STTR Phase I: Blockchain ontology and services for monitoring and performing analytics on smart contracts

Award ID: 2052118

The broader impact/commercial potential of this STTR project addresses a paradox faced by open web developers, users, and regulators: the use of centralized platform-creator hosted web portals to interact with an evolving decentralized finance (DeFi) application ecosystem. The proposed work will instrument a new open web paradigm that will improve user accessibility and ability to compose and perform data analysis on smart contracts. The approach will enable improvement of web-service reliability and security while weeding out bad actors. Improving the accessibility and analysis of smart contracts is anticipated to help unlock further value and solutions across a range of applications and new business opportunities that can benefit from dynamic contracting. This STTR Phase I project proposes to build a blockchain-adjacent metadata model that enhances the utility and security of smart contracts for users and developers. The project will undertake the practical challenge of reverse-engineering smart contracts to outline a metadata model which will enhance discovery and security of services, creating a scaffold for composable apps. The approach will organize blockchain abstractions through code similarity analysis and program de-obfuscation by reverse engineering, instrument compile-time creation and publish metadata models by developers, and demonstrate how this data can be used to build a composable app user experience. The project will deploy privacy-preserving targeted advertising frameworks using deterministic services alongside the data from the metadata model. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

NSF Program Director: Anna Brady-Estevez