Smart Contract Development from the Perspective of Developers: Topics and Issues Discussed on Social Media
Abstract
Blockchain-based platforms are emerging as a transformative technology that can provide reliability, integrity, and auditability without trusted entities. One of the key features of these platforms is the trustworthy decentralized execution of general-purpose computation in the form of smart contracts, which are envisioned to have a wide range of applications. As a result, a rapidly growing and active community of smart-contract developers has emerged in recent years. A number of research efforts have investigated the technological challenges that these developers face, introducing a variety of tools, languages, and frameworks for smart-contract development, focusing on security. However, relatively little is known about the community itself, about the developers, and about the issues that they face and discuss. To address this gap, we study smart-contract developers and their discussions on two social media sites, Stack Exchange and Medium. We provide insight into the trends and key topics of these discussions, into the developers’ interest in various security issues and security tools, and into the developers’ technological background.
Type
Venue
4th Workshop on Trusted Smart Contracts (WTSC 2020), 405–422
Authors
Ph.D. 2025
Afiya Ayman joined the Applied Artificial Intelligence Lab as a Ph.D. student in January 2019. Her research interest
is in contemporary computational sciences, including and not limited to Data Science, Machine Learning, and Cyber
Security. She earned her bachelor’s degree in Computer Science & Engineering from Chittagong University of
Engineering & Technology, Bangladesh. Currently, her research focuses on the application of neural networks and
machine learning to restructure the operational planning of a regional transportation authority to be more
energy-efficient.
Associate Professor
Aron Laszka is an Associate Professor in the College of Information Sciences and Technology at the Pennsylvania State University. Previously, he was an Assistant Professor at the University of Houston, a Research Assistant Professor at Vanderbilt University, and a Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley.
His research interests revolve around artificial intelligence and cyber-physical systems, focusing on machine learning for decision making and optimization, with applications in smart and connected communities, critical infrastructure, and cybersecurity.
His research is funded by the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, the Department of Transportation, and other agencies.