This research analyzes the problems of smart contracts and the whole concept of smart contracts and provides a solution that can resolve all such the issues in the current smart contract concept and additionally to this change the architecture used in smart contracts and blockchain. In this research, the author lists the issues, analyzes them, and provides the solution explaining how it will change the whole concept, performance, and what sort of positive impact it will have not only on the performance of smart contracts and their extensibility but also the impact on pollution and saving of energy.
TopIntroduction
Over a decade a new term blockchain is known as a technology which is used as distributed database (Bernstein & Lange, 2016) which keeps the track of financial transactions of different types of crypto-currencies (Brown, 2016), such as BTC, ETH, etc. All the payments or financial transactions go via peer-to-peer network which allows to decentralized the participants of the network granting them equal, from the network point of view, privileges and consequently such the network architecture is different from a regular client-server architecture where all the clients depend on the server: in the other words, if server is down then no client can connect to it and consequently make any type of transaction (Heuvel, 2014).
Blockchain technology introduced a new term: the smart contracts which were first proposed in 1990s by Nick Szabo (1997). The whole concept is quite simple: a smart contract is nothing but a computer program which checks different types of conditions and based on that decided which function(s) to run to perform the smart contract.
A typical schema of blockchain is shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1. A typical schema of blockchain
Bitcoin officially was the first globally known crypto-currency, although the very first one appeared in the beginning of 90s (Li et al., 2017). The Bitcoin blockchain contains only financial transactions and nothing else. The second well known cryptocurrency in this sphere was ETH which additionally introduced the term “smart contracts” into the blockchain world. A smart contract can be considered as a small program running on a blockchain when it receives a request (Nguyen, 2019). With the help of smart contracts the users could add additional logic not only to the financially related logic but also create very primitive games. At the same time, from the technical prospective, a smart contract is considered as a user who can receive and send transactions. This “user” has a record of different states, also known as variables and these variables stored in a blockchain can be changed and/or read. Reading a blockchain data is free for the users however is still very slow.
There are several reasons why reading data from a blockchain can be slow, one of them is the size of the blockchain itself. As the blockchain grows, the amount of data that needs to be processed and verified also grows. This can lead to longer transaction times and slower data retrieval.
Finally, the consensus mechanism used by the blockchain can also impact the speed of data retrieval. Some consensus mechanisms, such as proof-of-work, require complex mathematical calculations to be performed by the nodes in the network. These calculations can take time and slow down the overall performance of the blockchain.
Overall, reading data from a blockchain can be slow due to the decentralized nature of the technology, the size of the blockchain, and the consensus mechanism used. However, there are ongoing efforts to improve the scalability and speed of blockchain technology, such as the implementation of sharding and other scaling solutions.
However the change of variables (also called as a state change) is expensive (Zhang Rong, 2020). Why it’s expensive: Every state change consumes funds (in Ether world known as gas), it also consumes quite a lot of time necessary for: a) making a transaction(a request for a state change), b) for processing such the transaction c) for building a transaction block which contains a new value for a smart contract. Thus in the Ether world, before the hard fork, the time for building a new block was 21 seconds, after the hard fork it still takes 12.5 seconds which is a lot in the world of IT (Mkrttchian et al., 2019).