6^th Workshop on Trusted Smart Contracts

In Association with Financial Cryptography 2022

May 6, 2022 ( NEW DATE! )

Radisson Grenada Beach Resort

Call for Papers

Decentralised computing and smart contracts are emerging as the framework for applications ranging from cryptocurrencies, to decentralised finance, provenance, self-sovereign identity, non-fungible tokens, to cite but a few. Smart contracts , i.e. self-enforcing agreements in the form of executable programs are deployed to and run on top of (specialised) blockchains. Present in Bitcoin, mainstream within Ethereum and pervasive in all the last-generation blockchain and multi-chain proposals, smart contract languages and technologies are undergoing an interesting and challenging evolution, which poses open research questions.

Such a novel and evolving programming framework and execution environment is challenging in terms of definition and verification. Multidisciplinary and multifactorial aspects affect correctness, safety, efficiency, resilience, privacy, accountability, regulatory compliance, and trust in smart contracts. This workshop focuses on various aspects of the new engineering paradigms, research on programming languages and verification methodologies, in broad terms, for the foundations of Trusted Smart Contracts.

A non-exhaustive list of topics of interest and open problems includes:

- validation and definition of the programming abstractions and execution models,
- foundations of software engineering for smart contracts,
- authentication and anonymity management,
- privacy and privacy-preserving contracts,
- oblivious transfer,
- data provenance,
- access rights,
- game-theoretic approaches for security and validation,
- resilience of the validation/mining/execution model,
- verification of the properties expected to be enforced by smart contracts,
- fairness and decentralisation of contracts and their management,
- effects of consensus mechanisms and proof-of mechanisms on smart contracts,
- smart contract in side-chains and multi-chains,
- blockchain data analytics,
- law and regulatory aspects,
- rewards, economics and sustainability/stability of the framework,
- comparison of the permissioned and non-permissioned scenarios,
- use cases and killer applications of smart contracts.

A non-exhaustive list of applications includes:

- decentralised finance,
- self-sovereign identity,
- non-fungible tokens,
- central bank digital currencies,
- programmable money,
- future outlook on smart contract technologies.

The WTSC workshop aims to gather together researchers from both academia and industry interested in the many facets of Trusted Smart Contract engineering, and to provide a multi-disciplinary forum for discussing open problems, proposed solutions and the vision on future developments. WTSC focuses primarily on smart contracts as an application layer on top of blockchains. Aspects of the underlying supporting blockchains may clearly become relevant in so much as they affect properties of the smart contracts.

Experts in fields including (a non-exhaustive list):

- programming languages,
- verification,
- security,
- software engineering,
- decision and game theory,
- cryptography,
- finance and economics,
- law and regulators,

as well as, practitioners and relevant companies, are invited to take part and submit their findings, case studies and reports on open problems for presentation at the workshop.

Invited Speaker

WTSC has traditionally had recognised innovators and renown contributors giving invited talks at previous editions, including Vitalik Buterin, Arthur Breitman, Bud Mishra, Igor Artamonov, Ian Grigg, Darren Tapp. This year we are aiming at similar high-level invitees.

Important Dates

WTSC adopts a submission schedule with double deadline . A first deadline will allow authors to plan their participation well in advance. A second deadline will allow authors who need extra time to develop their contributions, to have a further opportunity to participate. Selected borderline papers from the first deadline will be considered for and also invited to resubmit to the second deadline. Abstract registration is kindly requested in advance.

IMPORTANT UPDATE : Due to the recent spread of the Omicron variant, the FC conference, and then WTSC’22, has been postponed to the first week of May. For this reason, we decided to fix a third (and last) submission deadline.

Abstract Registration (recommended)	November 19, 2021
Paper Submission Deadline	November 26, 2021
Early Author Notification	December 17, 2021
Abstract Registration	January 10, 2022
Submission Deadline	January 17, 2022
Author Notification	February 7, 2022
Late Abstract Registration (Optional)	March 11, 2022
Late Submission Deadline	March 21, 2022
Late Author Notification	April 6, 2022
Final pre-proceeding papers	April 28, 2022
WTSC	May 6, 2022
Financial Cryptography	May 2-6, 2022
Final Papers	TBA for the post proceeding Springer volume.

Submission

Submitted papers should describe novel, previously unpublished scientific contributions to the field, and will be subject to rigorous peer review.

Accepted submissions will be included in the conference proceedings to be published in the Springer-Verlag Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series . Submissions are limited to 15 pages in standard LNCS format excluding references and appendices and must be submitted as a PDF file. A total page restriction may apply for the printed proceedings version. Committee members are not required to read the appendices, so the full papers have to be intelligible without them.

Regular papers must be anonymous with no author names, affiliations, acknowledgments, or obvious references. For each accepted paper the conference requires at least one registration at the general or academic rate.

All papers must be submitted electronically according to the instructions and forms found in the submission page.

Submission Page

Submission page: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=wtsc22

FC is organized annually by the International Financial Cryptography Association in cooperation with IACR.