# An Overview on Smart Contracts: Challenges, Advances and Platforms

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.10370 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.10370/

## Key facts

- Cited by 20 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 22 Dec 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 20 of 20)

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- [Dual-view Aware Smart Contract Vulnerability Detection for Ethereum](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.00336/) (2024)
- [Vulnerability Detection in Smart Contracts: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07922/) (2024)
- [An end-to-end agentic pipeline for smart contract translation and quality evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.13808/) (2026)
- [SmartEval: A Benchmark for Evaluating LLM-Generated Smart Contracts from Natural Language Specifications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.09610/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Smart contract technology is reshaping conventional industry and business processes. Being embedded in blockchains, smart contracts enable the contractual terms of an agreement to be enforced automatically without the intervention of a trusted third party. As a result, smart contracts can cut down administration and save services costs, improve the efficiency of business processes and reduce the risks. Although smart contracts are promising to drive the new wave of innovation in business processes, there are a number of challenges to be tackled.This paper presents a survey on smart contracts. We first introduce blockchains and smart contracts. We then present the challenges in smart contracts as well as recent technical advances. We also compare typical smart contract platforms and give a categorization of smart contract applications along with some representative examples.