Domain Specific Language for Smart Contract Development

Abstract

The notion to digitally articulate, execute, and enforce agreements with smart contracts has become a feasible reality today. Smart contracts have the potential to vastly improve the efficiency and security of traditional contracts through their self-executing autonomy. To realize smart contracts several blockchain-based ecosystems exist. Today a prominent representative is Ethereum. Its programming language Solidity is used to capture and express contractual clauses in the form of code. However, due to the conceptual discrepancy between contractual clauses and corresponding code, it is hard for domain stakeholders to easily understand contracts, and for developers to write code efficiently without errors. Our research addresses these issues by the design and study of a domain-specific smart contract language based on higher level of abstraction that can be automatically transformed to an implementation. In particular, we propose a clause grammar close to natural language, helpful coding abstractions, and the automatic integration of commonly occurring design patterns during code generation. Through these measures, our approach can reduce the design complexity leading to an increased comprehensibility and reduced error susceptibility. Several implementations of exemplary smart contract scenarios, mostly taken from the Solidity documentation, are used to demonstrate the applicability of our approach.