SigVM: Enabling Event-Driven Execution for Autonomous Smart Contracts

TL;DR

SigVM introduces an event-driven execution model for blockchain smart contracts, enabling autonomous contract interactions and reducing reliance on off-chain relays, demonstrated through a new platform and language compiler.

Contribution

The paper presents SigVM, a novel blockchain virtual machine supporting event-driven execution, along with SigChain and SigSolid, to enable autonomous smart contracts with minimal code modifications.

Findings

Reimplemented benchmark applications autonomously using SigVM.

Reduced contract code modification to an average of 2.6%.

Eliminated dependency on off-chain relay servers.

Abstract

This paper presents SigVM, a novel blockchain virtual machine that supports an event-driven execution model, enabling developers to build autonomous smart contracts. Contracts in SigVM can emit signal events, on which other contracts can listen. Once an event is triggered, corresponding handler functions are automatically executed as signal transactions. We build an end-to-end blockchain platform SigChain and a contract language compiler SigSolid to realize the potential of SigVM. Experimental results show that our benchmark applications can be reimplemented with SigVM in an autonomous way, eliminating the dependency on unreliable mechanisms like off-chain relay servers. The development effort of reimplementing these contracts with SigVM is small, i.e., we modified on average 2.6% of the contract code.