Blockchain Technology and Applications

A special issue of Technologies (ISSN 2227-7080). This special issue belongs to the section "Information and Communication Technologies".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 June 2019) | Viewed by 10347

Special Issue Editors

Department of Computer Science, College of Engineering, Design and Physical Science, Brunel University, London, UK
Interests: mining software repositories; empirical software engineering; agile methodologies; software metrics and patterns; blockchain and cryptocurrencies
Department of Mathematics and Informatics, University of Cagliari, Cagliari, Italy
Interests: complex software systems; software engineering; blockchain and smart contracts
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Blockchain is no longer just about bitcoin or cryptocurrencies in general, and it can be seen as a disruptive and revolutionary technology, which will have major impacts on multiple aspects of our lives. The revolutionary power of such technology can be compared with the revolution sparked by the world wide web and the Internet in general. As the Internet can be seen as a mean for sharing information, so blockchain technologies can be seen as a way to introduce the next level: Blockchain allows the possibility of sharing value.

Motivations for this Special Issue are the outstanding increased interest in software communities, in the academy, in the industry, in the finance and in the media of the new emerging software technology of the blockchain. This Special Issue aims at bringing the interest of researchers, practitioners, and people from industry to the current new directions and challenges for blockchain-oriented software engineering, and at investigating the need for novel specialized software engineering practices for the blockchain software sector.

This Special Issue is intended to report the recent advances that this new technology raises with respect to software engineering.

Articles in this Special Issue will address topics that include:

  • Blockchain-Oriented Software Engineering
  • Blockchain software analysis and reengineering
  • Formal specification of Blockchain behaviour
  • Agile and Lean processes for Blockchain software development
  • Tools for Blockchain software distributed development and community management
  • Smart Contracts reengineering
  • Security and reliability in Blockchain and Smart Contracts
  • Smart Contract Testing (SCT)
  • Blockchain Transaction Testing (BTT) to ensure status integrity
  • Blockchain Software architecture, design notation and metamodels
  • Applications in Economy and Finance
  • Internet of Things
  • Notarization Supply chain management Web 3.0 e-commerce, e-health, e-democracy social networks.

Dr. Giuseppe Destefanis
Dr. Roberto Tonelli
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Technologies is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Published Papers (1 paper)

Order results
Result details
Select all
Export citation of selected articles as:

Research

16 pages, 276 KiB  
Article
Towards Analyzing the Complexity Landscape of Solidity Based Ethereum Smart Contracts
by Péter Hegedűs
Technologies 2019, 7(1), 6; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/technologies7010006 - 03 Jan 2019
Cited by 41 | Viewed by 9407
Abstract
Blockchain-based decentralized cryptocurrency platforms are currently one of the hottest topics in technology. Although most of the interest is generated by cryptocurrency related activities, it is becoming apparent that a much wider spectrum of applications can leverage the blockchain technology. The primary concepts [...] Read more.
Blockchain-based decentralized cryptocurrency platforms are currently one of the hottest topics in technology. Although most of the interest is generated by cryptocurrency related activities, it is becoming apparent that a much wider spectrum of applications can leverage the blockchain technology. The primary concepts enabling such general use of the blockchain are the so-called smart contracts, which are special programs that run on the blockchain. One of the most popular blockchain platforms that supports smart contracts is Ethereum. As smart contracts typically handle money, ensuring their low number of faults and vulnerabilities are essential. To aid smart contract developers and help to mature the technology, we need analysis tools and studies for smart contracts. As an initiative for this, we propose the adoption of some well-known OO metrics for Solidity smart contracts. Furthermore, we analyze more than 40 thousand Solidity source files with our prototype tool. The results suggest that smart contract programs are short, neither overly complex nor coupled too much, do not rely heavily on inheritance, and either quite well-commented or not commented at all. Moreover, smart contracts could benefit from an external library and dependency management mechanism, as more than 85% of the defined libraries in Solidity files code the same functionalities. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Blockchain Technology and Applications)
Show Figures

Figure 1

Back to TopTop