Towards a decentralized e-prescription system using smart contracts

In recent years, the rapid development of cryptocurrencies and their underlying blockchain technology has revived Szabo’s original idea of smart contracts, i.e., computer protocols that are designed to automatically facilitate, verify, and enforce the negotiation and implementation of digital contracts without central authorities. Smart contracts can find a wide spectrum of potential application scenarios in the digital economy and intelligent industries, including financial services, management, healthcare, and Internet of Things, among others, and also have been integrated into the mainstream blockchain-based development platforms, such as Ethereum and Hyperledger. However, smart contracts are still far from mature, and major technical challenges such as security and privacy issues are still awaiting further research efforts. For instance, the most notorious case might be “The DAO Attack” in June 2016, which led to more than $50 million Ether transferred into an adversary’s account. In this paper, we strive to present a systematic and comprehensive overview of blockchain-enabled smart contracts, aiming at stimulating further research toward this emerging research area. We first introduced the operating mechanism and mainstream platforms of blockchain-enabled smart contracts, and proposed a research framework for smart contracts based on a novel six-layer architecture. Second, both the technical and legal challenges, as well as the recent research progresses, are listed. Third, we presented several typical application scenarios. Toward the end, we discussed the future development trends of smart contracts. This paper is aimed at providing helpful guidance and reference for future research efforts.

Smart contracts in blockchain systems are widely used as automated agreements that can expedite the execution of a contract. Based on the characteristics of smart contracts analyzed through agreements in the Indonesian Civil Code (BW), it can be concluded that smart contracts can be legally used in contractual legal activities in Indonesia. This is because smart contracts meet the requirements outlined in the BW as guidelines for contract formation, particularly concerning the validity of contracts. Using a normative method, which employs literature as legal material for this writing, the result shows that the validity of smart contracts in blockchain, based on Indonesian contract law, aligns with the contract law that fulfills the requirements of Article 1320 BW. Smart contracts can also be classified as standard agreements where the parties agree based on an existing and mutually agreed-upon contract. Until now, there are no specific regulations regarding smart contracts in Indonesia, even though smart contracts are already widely used in the country.

In collaborative environments, where enterprises interact each other’s without a centralised authority that ensures trust among them, the ability of providing cross-organisational services must be enabled also between mutually untrusting participants. Blockchain platforms and smart contracts have been proposed to implement collaborative processes. However, current solutions are platform-dependent and deploy on-chain the whole process, thus increasing the execution costs of smart contracts if deployed on permissionless blockchain. In this paper, we propose an approach that includes criteria to identify trust-demanding objects and activities in collaborative processes, a model to describe smart contracts in a platform-independent way and guidelines to deploy them in a blockchain. To this aim, a three-layered model is used to describe: (i) the collaborative process, represented in BPMN, where the business expert is supported to add annotations that identify trust-demanding objects and activities; (ii) Abstract Smart Contracts based on trust-demanding objects and activities only and specified by means of descriptors, that are independent from any blockchain technology; (iii) Concrete Smart Contracts, that implement abstract ones and are deployed over a specific blockchain, enabling the creation of a repository where a single descriptor is associated with multiple implementations. The flexibility and reduced costs of the approach, due to the smart contracts abstraction and the use of blockchain only when necessary, are discussed with a case study on remote monitoring services in the digital factory.

A comprehensive survey of smart contract security: State of the art and research directions

Blockchain smart contracts are prevalent nowadays as numerous applications are developed based on this feature. Though smart contracts are important and widely used, they contain certain vulnerabilities. This paper discusses various security issues that arise in smart contract applications. They are categorized in the smart contract platform, the applications that integrate with the Blockchain, and the vulnerabilities in smart contract code. A detailed study of smart contract-specific vulnerabilities and the defense against those vulnerabilities are presented in this article. Because of certain limitations of platforms or programming language used to write smart contract, there are possibilities of attacks on smart contracts. Hence different security measures or precautions to be taken while writing the smart contract code is discussed in this article. This will prevent the potential attacks happening on Blockchain distributed applications.

Blockchain is a revolutionary technology that offers a new kind of inventive service. It can handle a variety of sophisticated issues associated with the secrecy, integrity, and availability of fast and secure distributed systems. This concept paper begins by addressing the shift in people's attitudes towards the insurance industry, particularly in Malaysia, and then goes on to understand how the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT), Task Technology Fit (TTF), and Initial Trust Model (ITM), influence behavioural intentions in using blockchain smart contracts. A digital insurance platform must be redefined after the increase in online insurance sales transactions prompted by COVID-19 to satisfy the market's expectations. Whereas traditional paper contracts rely on middlemen for execution, blockchain smart contracts are now based on blockchains, which include an immutable record of data and the ability to remove single points of failure. Despite the growing popularity of blockchain research in recent years, research on blockchain smart contract adoption behaviour at the individual level concerning insurance services remains limited. Hence, this study utilises the three models to characterise how performance expectancy, technological context, and initial trust interact to forecast behavioural intention. Furthermore, we stressed the need for additional research to demonstrate the intention to employ blockchain smart contracts is impacted by performance anticipation, technical environment, and personal initial trust. Based on the review, we will design realistic research that will incorporate prospects for theoretical progress as well as empirical discoveries in blockchain smart contract studies. The findings are intended to assist policymakers in developing suitable and improved strategies for capturing interest in blockchain smart contract insurance services in the Malaysian market. We also believe that the evolution of blockchain technology in tandem with smart contracts will enable the creation of new sorts of innovative services, such as insurance.

A blockchain is a list of data blocks as a publicly distributed ledger, which are linked together using cryptography. By allowing Turing-complete programming languages to implement smart contracts, recent blockchains such as Ethereum can reduce needs in trusted intermediators, arbitrations and enforcement costs. However, subtle errors in smart contracts have induced an enormous financial loss—for examples, the DAO attack, Parity multisignature wallet attacks, and integer underflow/overflow attacks. To identify such errors in smart contracts, various researches are performed, which are based on static analysis and theorem proving. However, they only support inspection for pre-defined error patterns, or they cannot explore the whole searching space exhaustively or be fully automatic. Hence, in this paper, we propose a novel formal verification technique to analyze blockchain smart contracts by using ATL model checking. In our methodology, we represent the interaction between users and smart contracts into a two-player game and verify properties we want to check using MCMAS that is an efficient ATL model checker for multi-agent systems. Moreover, we present three case studies to show that our proposal can successfully identify subtle flaws in real world smart contracts.

As blockchain technology increasingly underpins digital transactions, smart contracts have emerged as a pivotal tool for automating these transactions. While smart contracts offer efficiency and security, their automation introduces significant legal challenges. Detecting and preventing fraud is a primary concern. This paper proposes a novel application of artificial intelligence (AI) to address these challenges. We will develop a machine learning model, specifically a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), to effectively detect and mitigate fraudulent activities within smart contracts. The AI model will analyze both textual and transactional data from smart contracts to identify patterns indicative of fraud. This approach not only enhances the security of digital transactions on blockchain platforms but also informs the development of legal standards and regulatory frameworks necessary for governing these technologies. By training on a dataset of authentic and fraudulent contract examples, the proposed AI model is expected to offer high predictive accuracy, thereby supporting legal practitioners and regulators in real-time monitoring and enforcement. The ultimate goal of this project is to contribute to legal scholarship by providing a robust technological tool that aids in preventing cybercrimes associated with smart contracts, thereby laying a foundation for future legal research and development at the intersection of law, technology, and security.

BackgroundAn estimated US $2.6 billion loss is attributed to health care fraud and abuse. With traditional health care claims verification and reimbursement, the health care provider submits a claim after rendering services to a patient, which is then verified and reimbursed by the payer. However, this process leaves out a critical stakeholder: the patient for whom the services are actually rendered. This lack of patient participation introduces a risk of fraud and abuse. Blockchain technology enables secure data management with transparency, which could mitigate this risk of health care fraud and abuse.ObjectiveThe aim of this study is to develop a framework using blockchain to record claims data and transactions in an immutable format and to enable the patient to act as a validating node to help detect and prevent health care fraud and abuse.MethodsWe developed a health care fraud and abuse blockchain technical framework and prototype using key blockchain tools and application layers including consensus algorithms, smart contracts, tokens, and governance based on digital identity on the Ethereum platform (Ethereum Foundation).ResultsOur technical framework maps to the claims adjudication process and focuses on Medicare claims, with the US Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) as the central authority. A prototype of the framework system was developed using the blockchain platform Ethereum (Ethereum Foundation), with its design features, workflow, smart contract functions, system architecture, and software implementation outlined. The software stack used to build the system consisted of a front-end user interface framework, a back-end processing server, and a blockchain network. React was used for the user interface framework, and NodeJS and an Express server were used for the back-end processing server; Solidity was the smart contract language used to interact with a local Ethereum blockchain network.ConclusionsThe proposed framework and the initial prototype have the potential to improve the health care claims process by using blockchain technology for secure data storage and consensus mechanisms, which make the claims adjudication process more patient-centric for the purposes of identifying and preventing health care fraud and abuse. Future work will focus on the use of synthetic or historic CMS claims data to assess the real-world viability of the framework.

Despite their promising potential, the level of implementation of smart contracts is not at the desired level. To expedite the acceptance and deployment of smart contracts, the barriers to the implementation of smart contracts should be revealed. Past studies, however, do not provide a comprehensive theoretical basis due to several methodological drawbacks. Thus, this study aims to identify and assess the barriers to the implementation of smart contracts by considering the inherent characteristics of the construction industry. An in-depth literature review was initially conducted to extract all barriers proposed in the literature. Then, focus group discussion (FGD) sessions were conducted with the participation of the construction practitioners. In the FGD session, the results of the literature review were validated, and nine additional barriers were proposed. Finally, a total of 20 barriers under five categories was proposed for the smart contract adoption in the construction industry. Then, a questionnaire survey was conducted with the participation of 15 construction practitioners. Lastly, fuzzy VIKOR analysis was performed to assess the criticality of the implementation barriers. This study indicates that the construction companies should overcome not only technical barriers but also managerial barriers. Changes in the processes arisen due to smart contract implementation prevent the construction from implementing a smart contract, since the employees show resistance to these changes. Furthermore, the companies believe that they can lose their bargaining power with smart contracts, and they do not want to lose their power. Bottlenecks are considered the most critical barrier from a technological perspective, and companies are concerned about the problems resulting from them. Although this study provides insights into the barriers to smart contracts in the construction industry, all the respondents are from Turkey. Therefore, some of the findings of this study can be specific to the Turkish construction industry.

Blockchain smart contracts show the next stage in the development of protocols that support the interaction of independent nodes without the presence of a governing authority. Blockchain smart contracts are believed to be a potentially enabling technology for a wealth of future applications. But turns out, like every other maturing technology, blockchain smart Contract also has it challenges and limitations. Understanding these challenges and limitation can help business making decision before they put their efforts in blockchain application development. In this paper game theory is combined to look into what Smart Contracts are and what they are assumed to be. The aim is to give businesses a clear idea about smart contracts and help them to decide if the contracts are viable for large scale application.

The number of applications supported by blockchain smart contracts has been greatly increasing in recent years, with smart contracts now being used across several domains, such as the music industry, finance, and retail, to name a few. Despite being used in business-critical contexts, the number of security vulnerabilities in smart contracts has also been increasing, with many of them being exploited and resulting in huge financial and reputation losses. This is despite the enormous effort that is being placed into the research and development of vulnerability detection tools and techniques, which have also greatly increased in number and type in the last few years. Motivated by the recent increase in both vulnerabilities and vulnerability detection techniques, this paper reviews the latest research in smart contract vulnerability detection, emphasizing the techniques being used, the vulnerabilities targeted, and the characteristics of the dataset used for evaluating the technique. We mapped the vulnerabilities against two common vulnerability classification schemes (DASP and SWC) and performed a consolidated analysis. We identified the current research trends and gaps in each technique and highlighted future research opportunities in the field.

Existing blockchain smart contract platforms are designed as monolithic architectures. Even though there are multiple smart contracts with fully independent business logic, they run on a single monolithic container. This dependence on a monolithic container can be a performance bottleneck during the processing of a large number of transactions. To address this challenge, microservice-based architecture is adopted in the blockchain smart contracts by introducing a novel architecture to run independently on separate microservices. The new smart contract architecture is built on top of Mystiko blockchain, a functional programming and actor-based “Aplos” concurrent smart contract platform. Aplos is identified as a “Smart Actor” platform since it is built using Actor-based concurrency handling. Based on the philosophy of microservices, the Aplos Smart Actor platform on Mystiko blockchain is redesigned. This architecture is introduced as “SaaS - Smart actors as a service”. With SaaS, different Aplos smart actors in the blockchain are deployed as separate independent services (e.g. docker containers) instead of a single monolith service. This ensures different smart actors can execute transactions independently. An additional benefits to SaaS is that the architecture increases the scalability by guaranteeing concurrent execution of transactions, producing high transaction throughput on the blockchain.

Smart contracts and Blockchain are necessary for transactions in supply chain management. A smart contract is an agreement in the form of a cryptographic code digitally signed by the actors. This technology holds the data transaction transparently and securely between the actors. The actors may benefit without intermediaries involved in the transaction. Supply chain management will be easily tracked by decentralized data sharing. Supply chain management involves transactions in agricultural sectors such as farmers, Village Cooperatives units, distributors, and consumers. The Cooperative is a party that buys goods from farmers and sells them to consumers. A smart contract is a digital signature that can access the system in transactions. The system records log activities that show the origin of transactions. All actors can see the transaction of agricultural products stored in the blockchain ledger in the Blockchain. This paper discusses blockchain-based smart contracts scenario for supply chain management that is simulated and implemented in the Serious Game. The Game is developed using Unity 3D Development Platform, programming language contract using Solidity, Moralis as Web3 Development Platform and dApp as backend blockchain, Network Environment Polygon Ethereum, and Database that is Redis Enterprise, MongoDB Compass, and Mumbai Testnet.

The Blockchain is an emerging technology that is used in various applications for data security and trustworthiness. In the case of a public Blockchain, the data cannot be edited or deleted. In the case of a consortium and private Blockchain, the data can be edited or deleted based on the assigned permission, and the data privacy can be maintained. Blockchain's smart contract provides security to stored data, but it is vulnerable to various security threats. Smart contracts still suffer from different variabilities like distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS), 51% vulnerability attacks, double-spending problems, and mining Pool attacks. The smart contract, run on a Blockchain framework, is the logical contract between two or more anonymous people without involving a third party. Hyperledger and Ethereum are two important frameworks that support the development of smart contracts using Blockchain technology. This paper has tried to analyze the security issues of smart contracts developed on the Ethereum framework. An application of class scheduling management and student attendance management has been designed to validate and generate a smart contract. Received: 31 May 2025 | Revised: 4 August 2025 | Accepted: 29 August 2025 Conflicts of Interest The author declares that he has no conflicts of interest to this work. Data Availability Statement The data used in this article are virtual data to implement and to establish the algorithm. It is available in GitHub at https://github.com/ashisgitup/e-learning-Blockchain.git. Author Contribution Statement Ashis Kumar Samanta: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software, Validation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Resources, Data curation, Writing — original draft, Writing — review & editing, Visualization, Project administration.