Smart Contract Development in Practice: Trends, Issues, and Discussions on Stack Overflow

Blockchain based platforms are emerging as a transformative technology that can provide reliability, integrity, and auditability without trusted entities. One of the key features of these platforms is the trustworthy decentralized execution of general-purpose computation in the form of smart contracts, which are envisioned to have a wide range of applications from finance to the Internet of Things. As a result, a rapidly growing and active community of smart contract developers has emerged in recent years. A number of research efforts have investigated the technological challenges that smart contract developers face. However, very little is known about the community itself, about the developers, and about the issues that they discuss and care about. To address this gap, we study the online community of smart contract developers on Stack Overflow. We provide insight into the topics that they discuss, their technological and demographic background, and their awareness of security issues and tools. Our results show that the community of smart contract developers is very active and growing rapidly, in comparison with the general user population. However, a large fraction of smart contract related questions remain unanswered, which can pose a real threat to the viability of a sustainable community and may indicate gaps in community knowledge. Further, we observe very limited discussion of security related topics, which is concerning since smart contracts in practice are plagued by security issues.