Towards FATEful Smart Contracts

Abstract

Achieving fair, accountable, transparent, and ethical decentralized finance requires activating enabling properties at the level of smart contracts, the executable scripts at its basis. In this vision paper, a joint effort of the Central Bank of Italy, TU Wien, and the University of Oxford, we leverage the vast amount of experience in this sense from the database community and propose a logic-based reasoning framework that captures smart contracts as a set of rules in DatalogMTL, a temporal language for querying databases. We show how the theoretical underpinnings of the reasoning of DatalogMTL convey important properties to the approach and show it in action on industrial cases of relevance to a central bank.