Declarative Smart Contracts

TL;DR

DeCon is a declarative language for smart contracts that models contracts as relational tables, enabling easier specification, monitoring, and debugging, with minimal runtime overhead.

Contribution

This work introduces DeCon, a relational-based declarative language for smart contracts, along with a compiler to Solidity and runtime monitoring capabilities.

Findings

DeCon can implement ERC20 and ERC721 tokens.

DeCon incurs 14% median gas overhead for execution.

DeCon adds 16% median gas overhead for runtime verification.

Abstract

This paper presents DeCon, a declarative programming language for implementing smart contracts and specifying contract-level properties. Driven by the observation that smart contract operations and contract-level properties can be naturally expressed as relational constraints, DeCon models each smart contract as a set of relational tables that store transaction records. This relational representation of smart contracts enables convenient specification of contract properties, facilitates run-time monitoring of potential property violations, and brings clarity to contract debugging via data provenance. Specifically, a DeCon program consists of a set of declarative rules and violation query rules over the relational representation, describing the smart contract implementation and contract-level properties, respectively. We have developed a tool that can compile DeCon programs into executable Solidity programs, with instrumentation for run-time property monitoring. Our case studies demonstrate that DeCon can implement realistic smart contracts such as ERC20 and ERC721 digital tokens. Our evaluation results reveal the marginal overhead of DeCon compared to the open-source reference implementation, incurring 14% median gas overhead for execution, and another 16% median gas overhead for run-time verification.