A blockchain-based pattern for confidential and pseudo-anonymous contract enforcement
This addresses confidentiality and privacy concerns for companies hesitant to adopt blockchain technology due to data visibility risks, though it is incremental as it builds on existing smart contract and off-chain computation concepts.
The paper tackles the problem of business data and logic exposure in public blockchain smart contracts by proposing a pattern that executes automatable legal contract clauses with on-chain state storage and off-chain logic enforcement, using a real-life transportation case to argue for pseudonymity and confidentiality while maintaining an audit trail.
Blockchain has been praised for its capacity to hold data in a decentralized and tamper-proof way. It also supports the execution of code through blockchain's smart contracts, adding automation of actions to the network with high trustability. However, as smart contracts are visible by anybody on the network, the business data and logic may be at risk, thus companies could be reluctant to use such technology. This paper aims to propose a pattern that allows the execution of automatable legal contract clauses, where its execution states are stored in an on-chain smart-contract and the logic needed to enforce it wraps it off-chain. An engine completes this pattern by running a business process that corresponds to the legal contract. We then propose a pattern-based solution based on a real-life use case: transportation of refrigerated goods. We argue that this pattern guarantees companies pseudonymity and data confidentiality while ensuring that an audit trail can be reconstituted through the blockchain smart-contract to identify misbehavior or errors. This paper paves the way for a future possible implementation of the solution described, as well as its evaluation.