SCEditor: A Graphical Editor Prototype for Smart Contract Design and Development

Abstract

In recent years, particularly with the Ethereum blockchain's advent, smart contracts have gained significant interest as a means of regulating exchanges among multiple parties via code. This surge has prompted the emergence of various smart contract (SC) programming languages, each possessing distinct philosophies, grammatical structures, and components. Consequently, developers are increasingly involved in SC programming. However, these languages are platform specific, implying that a transition to another platform necessitates the use of different languages. Additionally, developers require a certain level of control over SCs to address encountered bugs and ensure maintenance. To address these developer-centric challenges, this paper presents SCEditor, a novel Eclipse Sirius-based prototype editor designed for the visualization, design, and creation of SCs. The editor proposes a means of standardizing the usage of SC programming languages through the incorporation of graphical syntax and a metamodel conforming to Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) principles and SC construction rules to generate an abstract SC model. The efficacy of this editor is demonstrated through testing on a voting SC written in Vyper and Solidity languages. Furthermore, the editor holds potential for future exploitation in model transformation and code generation for various SC languages.