5th Workshop on Trusted Smart Contracts

A potentially highly transformational technology currently developing on top of blockchain technologies are smart contracts, i.e. self-enforcing agreements in the form of executable programs that are deployed to and run on top of (specialised) blockchains. The Bitcoin proposal itself relied on a limited language for the validation of economical transactions. Subsequent proposals have further developed the idea of algorithmic validation of decentralised trust, along Szabo's intuition. A prominent example, also in terms of capitalisation and market share, is the Ethereum blockchain. It has a Turing-complete programming model, and bears one of the most strikingly performed attacks, the DAO attack (not to mention the discussed fork adopted as a counter measure). Possible further directions, are drawn by in-progress proposals like Tezos, where algorithmic validation also embraces decentralised consensus: smart contracts can negotiate the rules themselves which enable decentralised trust.

These technologies introduce a novel programming framework and execution environment, which are not satisfactorily understood at the moment. Multidisciplinary and multifactorial aspects affect correctness, safety, privacy, authentication, efficiency, sustainability, resilience and trust in smart contracts. Existing frameworks, which are competing for their market share, adopt different solutions to issues like the above ones. Merits of proposed solutions are still to be fully evaluated and compared by means of systematic scientific investigation, and further research is needed towards laying the foundations of Trusted Smart Contracts.

The Workshop on Trusted Smart Contracts (WTSC) aims to gather together researchers from both academia and industry interested in the many facets of Trusted Smart Contract engineering, and to provide a multi-disciplinary forum for discussing open problems, proposed solutions and the vision on future developments. Experts in fields including (but not limited to!) programming languages, verification, security, decision and game theory, cryptography, monetary systems, finance, and economics, as well as pratictioners and companies interested in block chain technologies, are invited to take part in this third edition of WTSC and make it a lively forum.