Directions in Smart Contract Research: A Selection
Duration: 00:16:12
Speaker: Philip Daian
Type: Talk
Expertise: Advanced
Event: Devcon
Date: Jul 2026
Tackling the problem of writing smart contracts is difficult, and understanding them fully remains even harder. We analyze what work the academic community is doing and should be doing to advance the basic foundational science of smart contracts. We make the case for better smart contracts through a three pronged approach: tooling (including formal verification and analysis models), bug bounties, and recovery through escape hatches. We survey current related work and discuss research and engineering directions to increase the cost of future attacks, in the context of lessons learned from contracts in the field.