Can We Effectively Use Smart Contracts to Stipulate Time Constraints?

TL;DR

This paper empirically evaluates how accurately smart contracts enforce time constraints across different blockchains, introducing a new metric to quantify execution consistency and its limitations near interval bounds.

Contribution

It proposes a novel metric called execution accuracy to measure the consistency of time-dependent smart contracts across various blockchain platforms.

Findings

Execution accuracy decreases near interval bounds.

Different blockchains exhibit varying levels of time constraint enforcement.

The metric allows comparison of blockchain suitability for time-sensitive smart contracts.

Abstract

Smart contracts provide the means to stipulate rules of interaction between mutually distrustful organizations. They encode contractual agreements on the basis of source code, which else need to be contractualized in natural language. While the mediation of contractual agreements via smart contracts is seamless in theory, it requires that the conditions of an interaction are accurately made available in the blockchain. Time is a prominent such condition. In the paper at hand, we empirically measure the consistency of a smart contract to yield equal results on the basis of the time of an interaction and its potentially inaccurate representation in the blockchain. We propose a novel metric called execution accuracy to measure this consistency. We specifically measure the execution accuracy of a time interval-constrained smart contract that executes distinct logic within and without some constraint interval. We run experiments for the local Ganache and Quorum and the public G\"orli and Rinkeby Ethereum blockchains. Our experiments confirm our intuition that execution accuracy decreases near interval bounds. The novelty of our proposed metric resides in its capacity to quantify this decrease and make distinct blockchains comparable with respect to their capacity to accurately stipulate time contraints.