SigVM: Enabling Event-Driven Execution for Autonomous Smart Contracts
This addresses the need for more reliable and autonomous smart contracts in blockchain systems, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing smart contract paradigms.
The paper tackles the problem of building autonomous smart contracts by introducing SigVM, a blockchain virtual machine with an event-driven execution model, which reduces dependency on off-chain relay servers and requires minimal code modifications (average 2.6%).
This paper presents SigVM, a novel blockchain virtual machine that supports an event-driven execution model, enabling developers to build autonomous smart contracts. Contracts in SigVM can emit signal events, on which other contracts can listen. Once an event is triggered, corresponding handler functions are automatically executed as signal transactions. We build an end-to-end blockchain platform SigChain and a contract language compiler SigSolid to realize the potential of SigVM. Experimental results show that our benchmark applications can be reimplemented with SigVM in an autonomous way, eliminating the dependency on unreliable mechanisms like off-chain relay servers. The development effort of reimplementing these contracts with SigVM is small, i.e., we modified on average 2.6% of the contract code.