Sustainable blockchain-enabled services: Smart contracts
It addresses the need for more versatile and complex blockchain services, potentially benefiting domains like legal, medical, and financial sectors, but appears incremental in building upon existing smart contract concepts.
This paper tackles the problem of enhancing blockchain-enabled services by extending smart contract functionality, proposing methods for automated management, secure matching, hierarchical communication, and optimized repositories to improve efficiency and security.
This chapter contributes to evolving the versatility and complexity of blockchain-enabled services through extending the functionality of blockchain-enforced smart contracts. The contributions include: (i) a method for automated management of contracts with hierarchical conditionality structures through an hierarchy of intelligent agents and the use of hierarchical cryptographic key-pairs; (ii) a method for efficient and secure matching and transfer of smart- contract underlyings (entities) among disparate smart contracts/subcontracts; (iii) a method for producing an hierarchy of common secrets to facilitate hierarchical communication channels of increased security in the context of smart contracts/subcontracts/underlyings; and (iv) a method for building secure and optimized repositories through distributed hash tables in the context of contracts/ subcontracts/underlyings. These methods help providing services that allow both narrower and worldwide reach and distribution of resources. The longevity of the blockchain technology is achieved through continuous innovation. Blockchain-enabled services are potentially an efficient, secure, automated, and cost-effective alternative or complement to current service infrastructures in a range of domains (legal, medical, financial, government, IoT).