Blockchain-based Smart Contracts: A Systematic Mapping Study
This study provides a structured overview for researchers and practitioners in blockchain technology, but it is incremental as it synthesizes existing work without new methods or data.
The paper conducted a systematic mapping study to identify current research topics and open challenges in smart contracts, analyzing 24 papers and finding that about two-thirds focus on issues like codifying, security, privacy, and performance.
An appealing feature of blockchain technology is smart contracts. A smart contract is executable code that runs on top of the blockchain to facilitate, execute and enforce an agreement between untrusted parties without the involvement of a trusted third party. In this paper, we conduct a systematic mapping study to collect all research that is relevant to smart contracts from a technical perspective. The aim of doing so is to identify current research topics and open challenges for future studies in smart contract research. We extract 24 papers from different scientific databases. The results show that about two thirds of the papers focus on identifying and tackling smart contract issues. Four key issues are identified, namely, codifying, security, privacy and performance issues. The rest of the papers focuses on smart contract applications or other smart contract related topics. Research gaps that need to be addressed in future studies are provided.