Blockchain smart contracts: Applications, challenges, and future trends

In recent years, the rapid development of blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies has influenced the financial industry by creating a new crypto-economy. Then, next-generation decentralized applications without involving a trusted third-party have emerged thanks to the appearance of smart contracts, which are computer protocols designed to facilitate, verify, and enforce automatically the negotiation and agreement among multiple untrustworthy parties. Despite the bright side of smart contracts, several concerns continue to undermine their adoption, such as security threats, vulnerabilities, and legal issues. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of blockchain-enabled smart contracts from both technical and usage points of view. To do so, we present a taxonomy of existing blockchain-enabled smart contract solutions, categorize the included research papers, and discuss the existing smart contract-based studies. Based on the findings from the survey, we identify a set of challenges and open issues that need to be addressed in future studies. Finally, we identify future trends.