The paper “Smart Derivative Contracts in DatalogMTL”, written by Prof. Stefano Ceri from the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering of the Politecnico di Milano and by Andrea Colombo, a student of the Ph.D. program in Data Analytics and Decision Sciences, together with Luigi Bellomarini (Bank of Italy) and Eleonora Laurenza (Bank of Italy, IVASS), was published in the 37th issue of the series “Markets, Infrastructures, Payment Systems”, published by the Bank of Italy.
The study, a joint work of the researchers of the Bank of Italy and the Politecnico di Milano, outlines a proposal for making the underlying logic of smart contracts more transparent and understandable through the use of a declarative implementation. In particular, leveraging the extensive experience of database and artificial intelligence communities in knowledge representation and reasoning languages, the authors propose an encoding of the Ethereum Perpetual Future (ETH-PERP) smart contract using the DatalogMTL language. The paper shows that such language allows for simpler, more understandable, and transparent representations of smart contracts for non-technical users. The implementation is validated by executing the ETH-PERP smart contract in Vadalog, a recent reasoner that supports DatalogMTL.
The series “Markets, Infrastructures, Payment Systems” aims to raise awareness of these issues and to foster debate among the institutions, economic operators and members of the public, making available to readers a set of experiences and know-how which also reflect the Bank’s active participation in the construction and management of Eurosystem infrastructures. The publications are didactic in scope, primarily targeting non-specialist readers, but equally take a close look at frontier issues, with academics and researchers in mind, as well as staff at international institutions and the other central banks.