A detailed overview of smart contract manager

Smart contracts have become an integral part of digital transactions that have facilitated Blockchain’s use and prospects. Businesses are making a pragmatic shift from their traditional processes to automation by integrating smart contracts. Automatic execution, optimized processes, no involvement of an intermediary, better compliance, smart contracts have a lot to offer. However, the absence of a proper protocol for smart contract management can make smart contract implementation challenging and complex for businesses, especially with the accelerating number of smart contract deployments across various organizational processes. Smart contract managers allow participants to effectively manage smart contracts on reaching mature levels of Blockchain implementation in organizations. Smart contract management solutions ease the complexities that arise when managing smart contracts among different participants and shared IT between two or more parties.

From finance to supply chain businesses, contract management solutions are gaining attention for their abilities to automate business processes. A Smart Contract Manager is a Blockchain-based innovative application that regulates how smart contracts are created, deployed, and by whom. It aims to monitor, alert, debug, and simulate smart contracts in real-time. With smart contracts gradually becoming important in automating and re-engineering business processes, a smart contract manager allows several users as participants to create and add smart contracts themselves. Smart contract management solutions can also allow participants to view the nature and data of transactions that are stored on the Blockchain network without disturbing other contracts running in the chain.

In a nutshell, smart contract managers help streamline the creation, deployment, execution and monitoring of smart contracts for business organizations, startups, and other institutions. Smart contract management solutions protects the security, integrity and immutability features of smart contracts deployed on Blockchain. This article will discuss the role and importance of smart contract managers in resolving challenges associated with Blockchain transactions on shared IT systems. We shall go into detail about what smart contract management is all about and the process of how smart contract managers work.

Table of Content:

• What are smart contracts?
• The role of smart contract management
• Features of smart contract management tools
• Create your smart contract manager with LeewayHertz

What are smart contracts?

A smart contract is a blockchain-powered decentralized application that self-executes itself when pre-defined ‘if/then’ conditions are met. Smart contracts are not managed by a central body or authority. Smart contracts can have varied applications across different enterprises. A smart contract can help facilitate service deliveries, money exchange, unlocking digital content protected by digital rights, changing the name or title of land, and more. For example, executing smart contracts into payment mechanisms may require a different architecture model from smart contracts executed to authenticate transactions using Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Some examples of business events on shared IT include authorization of payments or shipment receipts. Smart contracts have varied use cases and can be executed by businesses ranging from finance to insurance and retail.

Participants work together in the creation of a smart contract in Blockchain. Depending on the circumstance and/or event, the involved participants create and deploy business logic that sets the prerequisite for the transaction. Developers work on creating the logic when deploying smart contracts, keeping in mind the responses to the event. Once the contract is approved by the participants, it is then deployed on the Blockchain network. You can go through the detailed process of creating a smart contract here.

What is Smart Contract Management? – The role of smart contract manager

Because contracts are essential for automating and streamlining business processes, managing contracts effectively becomes important to reduce risks and errors. The key role of smart contract management solutions is to reduce the manual effort that goes into ensuring the compliance, accuracy, and validity of smart contracts within a network. Smart contract management solutions ensure that users carry out transactions seamlessly and successfully, eliminating issues of time consumption and high costs involved with manually managing smart contracts on Blockchain. Smart contract management solutions, thus, aim to expedite and validate contract-based processes that help automate business activities with greater transparency, immutability, and efficiency.

Essential features of a Smart Contract Manager

Visual debugger

For smart contracts to investigate the transaction, a visual debugger can help trace the line of transaction.

Real-time monitoring

Real-time monitoring and alerting can notify when an event disturbs the predefined set of rules executed by the Smart Contract. A smart contract manager can also send notifications if and when the predetermined conditions of the contract are not triggered.

Smart Contract Analytics

Analyze and monitor the behaviour of smart contracts to gain deeper insights into business transactions over Blockchain.

Functionalities of Smart Contract Management

Smart Contract Compiler

To associate a source code with an on-chain binary bytecode, it is important to do a verification and post-verification compilation of that source code. The post-verification compilation can be a complex process as developers need to replicate the same conditions as set in the original compiler. Such features of a smart contract compiler ensure that a verified binary is being used to promote your environments. A repository database like Github is used to replicate the source codes and perform the compilation. The bytecode is stored after the pointer points back to the same source code in the compiler.

Registry- Smart Contract

A smart contract registry is created after promoting a verified compiled contract to the environment. The registry is shared among all participants of the network and contains critical information that includes the bytecode, application binary interface (ABI), and developer documents containing all relevant codes and conditions essential to the contract. All participants within the network can access the smart contract registry, making it easier to deploy the verified contract version through any node in the environment.

Gateway APIs

If you want rich APIs for smart contracts, REST API gateways when executed to smart contracts ensure that the contract versions in the contact management dashboard are accessible from any node of the network. API pathname can ease the association of deployed instances of the smart contract across multiple chains, starting from development to production. Application codes use the same API pathways to access the smart contract logic in the environment.

Transaction Analyzer

Smart contract managers can analyze every transaction taking place on the Blockchain network. After the verified contract version has been compiled and promoted, a signature for the bytecode gets generated to further detect transactions that deployed bytecodes of the same signature. Transaction analyzer allows more flexibility when deploying smart contracts instances and transactions via any node of the environment.

Scanning vulnerabilities and detecting issues

Another great feature of smart contract management solutions is to scan smart contracts for vulnerabilities and issues before deploying them in the environment. As smart contracts already possess this powerful capability of validating Blockchain transactions, scanning for vulnerabilities and issues across smart contracts can further enhance trust and reduce the chance of errors when deploying smart contracts. Popular development tools like Truffle can help scan for security issues when integrated with smart contract managers. Ideally, tools with analysis techniques like dynamic analysis and static analysis can provide in-depth analysis reports on security vulnerabilities associated with the smart contract development lifecycle.

Create your own Smart Contract Manager with LeewayHertz

LeewayHertz can empower your organization with enterprise-grade smart contract management solutions to foster business growth. With our solutions, you can manage the deployment of smart contracts in your Blockchain environment. To ensure effective management of smart contracts, our considerations of the management and lifecycle of business logic can help you manage smart contracts across different business processes in a hassle-free manner.

We have developed smart contracts management solutions for mainstream Blockchain protocols like XinFin. If you’re looking for contract management solutions for your enterprise, we can help you explore the best possible options to effectively manage smart contracts. Our experienced team of Blockchain experts can help your business take advantage of the features of smart contract management systems for optimum results.