# Smart Contract Development from the Perspective of Developers: Topics and Issues Discussed on Social Media

## TL;DR

This paper analyzes social media discussions among smart contract developers to uncover key topics, security concerns, and community insights, addressing a gap in understanding developer perspectives and challenges.

## Contribution

It provides novel insights into developer discussions on social media, highlighting trends, security issues, and technological backgrounds in smart contract development.

## Key findings

- Developers focus on security issues and tools.
- Community discussions reveal key trends and concerns.
- Developers' technical backgrounds vary widely.

## Abstract

Blockchain-based platforms are emerging as a transformative technology that can provide reliability, integrity, and auditability without trusted entities. One of the key features of these platforms is the trustworthy decentralized execution of general-purpose computation in the form of smart contracts, which are envisioned to have a wide range of applications. As a result, a rapidly growing and active community of smart-contract developers has emerged in recent years. A number of research efforts have investigated the technological challenges that these developers face, introducing a variety of tools, languages, and frameworks for smart-contract development, focusing on security. However, relatively little is known about the community itself, about the developers, and about the issues that they face and discuss. To address this gap, we study smart-contract developers and their discussions on two social media sites, Stack Exchange and Medium. We provide insight into the trends and key topics of these discussions, into the developers' interest in various security issues and security tools, and into the developers' technological background.