Logical foundations of Smart Contracts

TL;DR

This paper explores the use of Situation Calculus and Golog to provide a formal logical foundation for smart contracts, enabling precise specification and reasoning about their complex, dynamic behaviors.

Contribution

It introduces a formal framework based on Situation Calculus and Golog for modeling and implementing smart contracts, addressing the need for a universal formalism.

Findings

Provides a logical formalism for smart contracts using Situation Calculus

Demonstrates how Golog can model complex contract behaviors

Facilitates reasoning about dynamic changes in smart contracts

Abstract

Nowadays, sophisticated domains are emerging which require appropriate formalisms to be specified accurately in order to reason about them. One such domain is constituted of smart contracts that have emerged in cyber physical systems as a way of enforcing formal agreements between components of these systems. Smart contracts self-execute to run and share business processes through blockchain, in decentralized systems, with many different participants. Legal contracts are in many cases complex documents, with a number of exceptions, and many subcontracts. The implementation of smart contracts based on legal contracts is a long and laborious task, that needs to include all actions, procedures, and the effects of actions related to the execution of the contract. An ongoing open problem in this area is to formally account for smart contracts using a uniform and somewhat universal formalism. This thesis proposes logical foundations to smart contracts using the Situation Calculus, a logic for reasoning about actions. Situation Calculus is one of the prominent logic-based artificial intelligence approaches that provides enough logical mechanism to specify and implement dynamic and complex systems such as contracts. Situation Calculus is suitable to show how worlds dynamically change. Smart contracts are going to be implement with Golog (written en Prolog), a Situation Calculus-based programming language for modeling complex and dynamic behaviors.