English Abstract
Abstract :
One of the building blocks of our legal and economic systems in society is the indispensable need and reliance on contracts and trust systems to protect individual rights.
Recently smart contracts are becoming parts of various blockchain platforms. The goal of smart contracts is to eliminate the third party and centralized trust systems. Due to recent emergence of smart contracts, there is no well-defined framework that researchers can use to evaluate smart contracts under various blockchain platforms and differentiate between them.
In this work, a survey on the prominent smart contract landscape specially those based on
blockchain have been conducted. Based on the survey, an evaluation framework to assess
smart contracts has been proposed. The framework is a set of criteria based on two major
aspects; infrastructure related and development related criteria. The evaluation framework
was peer-reviewed for reliability and validity. To measure the applicability of the proposed
framework, it has been used to empirically evaluate some of the most prominent smart
contract platforms. The results of the empirical evaluation have shown that the Ethereum
blockchain smart contracts exceeds the others in terms of development tools, resources,
and community support. EOS blockchain smart contracts have the best execution speeds,
and transaction costs. Lastly, Stellar blockchain has predictability and the best transaction
builder to use in smart contract development concerning user friendliness. Based on these
findings, valuable recommendations for smart contract developers are provided.
Keywords: Blockchain, Smart Contracts, Evaluation Framework, Empirical Evaluation
