Bitcontracts: Supporting Smart Contracts in Legacy Blockchains


METADATA ONLY
Loading...

Date

2021

Publication Type

Conference Paper

ETH Bibliography

yes

Citations

Altmetric
METADATA ONLY

Data

Rights / License

Abstract

In this paper we propose Bitcontracts, a novel solution that enables secure and efficient execution of generic smart contracts on top of unmodified legacy cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin that do not support contracts natively. The starting point of our solution is an off-chain execution model, where the contract's issuers appoints a set of service providers to execute the contract's code. The contract's execution results are accepted if a quorum of service providers reports the same result and clients are free to choose which such contracts they trust and use. The main technical contribution of this paper is how to realize such a trust model securely and efficiently without modifying the underlying blockchain. We also identify a set of generic properties that a blockchain system must support so that expressive smart contracts can be added safely, and analyze popular existing blockchains based on these criteria.

Publication status

published

Editor

Book title

28th Annual Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS 2021)

Journal / series

Volume

Pages / Article No.

Publisher

The Internet Society

Event

28th Annual Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS 2021)

Edition / version

Methods

Software

Geographic location

Date collected

Date created

Subject

Organisational unit

03755 - Capkun, Srdan / Capkun, Srdan check_circle

Notes

Conference lecture held on February 23, 2021.

Funding

Related publications and datasets