Secure compilation of rich smart contracts on poor UTXO blockchains
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Most blockchain platforms from Ethereum onwards render smart contracts as stateful reactive objects that update their state and transfer crypto-assets in response to transactions. In this way, they support the development of contracts in the imperative procedural paradigm, familiar to most programmers. A drawback of this design choice is that when a user submits a transaction, they cannot predict in which state it will be executed, exposing them to transaction-ordering attacks. The UTXO model is an alternative blockchain design that thwarts these attacks by requiring new transactions to spend past ones: since transactions have unique identifiers, reordering attacks are ineffective. Currently, the blockchains following the UTXO model either provide contracts with limited expressiveness (Bitcoin), or require complex run-time environments and unfamiliar programming abstractions (Cardano). We present a framework for smart contracts in the UTXO model, that allows expressive contracts to be securely executed by bare-bone UTXO blockchains with loop-free scripts enriched with covenants, and supports the familiar procedural programming style.
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