Best Practices: Evaluating Smart Contracts

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Del curso dictado por University at Buffalo

Smart Contracts

57 calificaciones

University at Buffalo

Smart Contracts

57 calificaciones

Curso 2 de 4 en SpecializationBlockchain

This second course of the Blockchain specialization will help you design, code, deploy and execute a smart contract – the computational element of the blockchain technology. Smart contracts allow for implementing user-defined operations of arbitrary complexity that are not possible through plain cryptocurrency protocols. They allow users to implement conditions, rules and policies of the domain applications. Smart contracts are a powerful feature that, when properly designed and coded, can result in autonomous, efficient and transparent systems. You will design and program smart contracts in Solidity language, test and deploy them in the Remix development environment, and invoke them from a simple web interface that Remix provides. This course features best practices for designing solutions with smart contracts using Solidity and Remix IDE. Main concepts are delivered through videos, demos and hands-on exercises.

De la lección

Best Practices

This module will focus on best practices including evaluating whether a blockchain-based solution is suitable for your problem, designing Solidity smart contracts, and those relating to Remix IDE.

Best Practices: Evaluating Smart Contracts4:48

Designing Smart Contracts7:20

Remix Web IDE3:27

Conoce a los instructores

Bina Ramamurthy
Teaching Professor
Computer Science and Engineering Department

Blockchain is not a solution for all applications.

Make sure your application requirements need blockchain features.

In other words, blockchain-based solutions and

smart contracts are not a panacea for all problems you have.

Then, what is it good for?

Recall that we learned in course one that

blockchain solution is most suitable for applications with these characteristics.

Decentralized problems, meaning participant hold the assets and are not

co-located involve peer-to-peer transaction without intermediaries.

Operate beyond the boundaries of trust among unknown peers.

Require validation, verification, and

recording on a universally timestamped immutable ledger.

And autonomous operations guided by rules and policies.

Make sure you need a smart contract and blockchain for your application.

Understand that smart contracts will be visible to

all participants on the chain and will be executed on all the full nodes.

You need a smart contract when you need a collective agreement based on rules,

regulations, policies, are governance enforced.

And a decision and the provenance for it must be recorded.

Smart contract is not for a single node computation.

It does not replace your client server or inherently stateless distributed solutions.

Keep the smart contract code simple, coherent, and auditable.

Let it solve a single problem well to a wide design and coding errors.

In other words, let the state variables and the functions

specified in a smart contract be addressing a single problem.

Do not include redundant data or unrelated functions.

Make the smart contract functions auditable by using

custom function modifiers instead of inline

if-else code for checking pre and post conditions for a function execution.

Smart contracts are usually part of a large distributed application.

The part that requires the services provided by the blockchain.

Blockchain is not a data repository.

Keep only the necessary data in this smart contract.

Of course, it is an immutable distributed ledger of transactions.

Recall that the blockchain also manages the state transitions and maintains a state hash,

transaction hash, and receipt hash in the header of each block.

These are indeed application-dependent overheads.

Given these characteristics, it's a good practice to analyze

the application data and separate them into on-chain and off-chain data.

Design the state variables for the smart contract to

be efficient storage for the on-chain data.

Leave the off-chain data to be managed by higher level applications.

As an example, instead of keeping

an entire 500 pages of a public legal document on the chain,

keep only the metadata about the document,

including a secure hash to protect the integrity of the document.

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