7^th Workshop on Trusted Smart Contracts (WTSC)

In Association with Financial Cryptography 2023

In Association with Blockchain Governance Initiative Network (BGIN block #8)


May 5, 2023

Bluesun Hotel Elaphusa
Bol, Brač, Croatia

Program Chairs

Andrea Bracciali	University of Stirling, UK
Geoffrey Goodell	UCL, UK
	Contact us

Call for Papers

Decentralised computing and smart contracts are emerging as the framework for applications ranging from cryptocurrencies, to decentralised finance, provenance, self-sovereign identity, non-fungible tokens, to cite but a few. Smart contracts , i.e. self-enforcing agreements in the form of executable programs are deployed to and run on top of (specialised) blockchains. Present in Bitcoin, mainstream within Ethereum and pervasive in all the last-generation blockchain and multi-chain proposals, smart contract languages and technologies are undergoing an interesting and challenging evolution, which poses open research questions.

Such a novel and evolving programming framework and execution environment is challenging in terms of definition and verification. Multidisciplinary and multifactorial aspects affect correctness, safety, efficiency, resilience, privacy, accountability, regulatory compliance, and trust in smart contracts. This workshop focuses on various aspects of the new engineering paradigms, research on programming languages and verification methodologies, in broad terms, for the foundations of Trusted Smart Contracts.

A non-exhaustive list of topics of interest and open problems includes:

- validation and definition of the programming abstractions and execution models,
- foundations of software engineering for smart contracts,
- authentication and anonymity management,
- privacy and privacy-preserving contracts,
- oblivious transfer,
- data provenance,
- access rights,
- game-theoretic approaches for security and validation,
- resilience of the validation/mining/execution model,
- verification of the properties expected to be enforced by smart contracts,
- fairness and decentralisation of contracts and their management,
- effects of consensus mechanisms and proof-of mechanisms on smart contracts,
- smart contract in side-chains and multi-chains,
- blockchain data analytics,
- law and regulatory aspects,
- rewards, economics and sustainability/stability of the framework,
- comparison of the permissioned and non-permissioned scenarios,
- use cases and killer applications of smart contracts.

A non-exhaustive list of applications includes:

- decentralised finance,
- self-sovereign identity,
- non-fungible tokens,
- central bank digital currencies,
- programmable money,
- future outlook on smart contract technologies.

The WTSC workshop aims to gather together researchers from both academia and industry interested in the many facets of Trusted Smart Contract engineering, and to provide a multi-disciplinary forum for discussing open problems, proposed solutions and the vision on future developments in blockchain technology and applications. WTSC focuses on smart contracts as an application layer on top of blockchains but blockchain theory and applications are of strong interest. Aspects of the underlying supporting blockchains are clearly relevant in so much as they affect properties of smart contracts as well as multi-layer applications.

Experts in fields including (a non-exhaustive list):

- programming languages,
- verification,
- security,
- software engineering,
- decision and game theory,
- cryptography,
- finance and economics,
- law and regulators,

as well as, practitioners and relevant companies, are invited to take part and submit their findings, case studies and reports on open problems for presentation at the workshop.

Invited Speaker

WTSC has traditionally had recognised innovators and renown contributors giving invited talks at previous editions, including Vitalik Buterin, Arthur Breitman, Bud Mishra, Igor Artamonov, Ian Grigg, Darren Tapp. This year we are aiming at similar high-level invitees.

Important Dates

WTSC adopts a submission schedule with a double deadline . A first deadline will allow authors to plan their participation well in advance. A second deadline will allow authors who need extra time to develop their contributions, to have a further opportunity to participate. Selected borderline papers from the first deadline may be considered for and also invited to resubmit to the second deadline after revision. Abstract registration is kindly requested in advance for both deadlines.

Early Abstract Registration (recommended)	January 23, 2023
Early Paper Submission Deadline	January 27, 2023
Early Author Notification	February 20, 2023
Late Abstract Registration	March 3, 2023
Late Submission Deadline	March 13 (AoE), 2023 - EXTENDED -
Late Author Notification	April 1, 2023
Final pre-proceeding papers	April 21, 2023
WTSC	May 5, 2023
Financial Cryptography	May 1-5, 2023
BGIN block #8 meeting	May 4-7, 2023
Final Papers	TBA for the post proceeding Springer volume.

Submission

Submitted papers should describe novel, previously unpublished and unsumbitted scientific contributions to the field, and will be subject to rigorous peer review.

Accepted submissions will be included in the conference proceedings to be published in the Springer-Verlag Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series . Submissions are limited to 15 pages in standard LNCS format excluding references and appendices and must be submitted as a PDF file. A total page restriction may apply for the printed proceedings version. Committee members are not required to read the appendices, so the full papers have to be intelligible without them.

Regular papers must be anonymous with no author names, affiliations, acknowledgments, or obvious references. For each accepted paper the conference requires at least one registration at the general or academic rate.

All papers must be submitted electronically according to the instructions and forms found in the submission page.

Submission Page

Submission page: HERE !

FC is organized annually by the International Financial Cryptography Association in cooperation with IACR.