IEEE Access (Jan 2022)
SmartCon: A Blockchain-Based Framework for Smart Contracts and Transaction Management
Abstract
A smart contract is known to be useful for automating business processes triggered by specific events caused by IoT sensors, data feeds, or other applications. A blockchain-based smart contract management system is an innovative technology that is foreseen to automate future business-to-business (B2B) processes. Blockchain is well-known to play a central role in business process re-engineering by optimizing business workflow operations, especially in multi-party arrangements. This paper presents a multi-organizational smart contract management system in which a user can create, deploy, and execute smart contracts. This paper consists of two parts; in the first part, we have compared existing smart contract management systems based on different characteristics that can play a vital role in selecting a particular system for a specific business need. In the second part, while utilizing and building upon the state-of-the-art techniques, we have built a framework for a blockchain-based smart contract and transaction management system. It is a unified architecture supporting DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) and organizational level blockchain-based smart contract execution. There are two types of separate blockchains utilized in the proposed framework, i.e., SBlockchain and TBlockchain. SBlockchain is used to store smart contracts, whereas all the data generated by the smart contracts is stored inside the TBlockchain. In addition, each smart contract has some terms and clauses necessary for some event execution. Various components of the framework and their implementation have been described in detail with the help of relevant use-cases.
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