The DOI matches its Crossref record; 74 of the 74 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Smart Contracts in Blockchain Technology: A Critical Review
Open accessAbstract
By utilizing smart contracts, which are essentially scripts that are anchored in a decentralized manner on blockchains or other similar infrastructures, it is possible to make the execution of predetermined procedures visible to the outside world. The programmability of previously unrealized assets, such as money, and the automation of previously manual business logic are both made possible by smart contracts. This revelation inspired us to analyze smart contracts in blockchain technologies written in English between 2012 and 2022. The scope of research is limited to the journal. Reviews, conferences, book chapters, theses, monographs, and interview-based works, and also articles in the press, are eliminated. This review comprises 252 articles over the last ten years with “Blockchain”, “block-chain”, “smart contracts”, and “smart contracts” as keywords. This paper discusses smart contracts’ present status and significance in blockchain technology. The gaps and challenges in the relevant literature have also been discussed, particularly emphasizing the limitations. Based on these findings, several research problems and prospective research routes for future study that will likely be valuable to academics and professionals are identified.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System
Squarepants, S. (2008) · SSRN Electronic Journal · doi:10.2139/ssrn.3977007 · Cited by 11,148
Blockchain and Federated Learning for Privacy-Preserved Data Sharing in Industrial IoT
Lu, Y., Huang, X., Dai, Y., Maharjan, S., & Zhang, Y. (2020) · IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics · doi:10.1109/tii.2019.2942190 · Cited by 1,245
An overview on smart contracts: Challenges, advances and platforms
Zheng, Z., Xie, S., Dai, H.-N., Chen, W., Chen, X., Weng, J., & Imran, M. (2020) · Future Generation Computer Systems · doi:10.1016/j.future.2019.12.019 · Cited by 1,197
Blockchain-Enabled Smart Contracts: Architecture, Applications, and Future Trends
Wang, S., Ouyang, L., Yuan, Y., Ni, X., Han, X., & Wang, F.-Y. (2019) · IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics: Systems · doi:10.1109/tsmc.2019.2895123 · Cited by 1,157
A fistful of bitcoins: characterizing payments among men with no names
Meiklejohn, S., Pomarole, M., Jordan, G., Levchenko, K., McCoy, D., Voelker, G. M., & Savage, S. (2013) · Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Internet measurement conference · doi:10.1145/2504730.2504747 · Cited by 1,017
Healthcare blockchain system using smart contracts for secure automated remote patient monitoring
Griggs, K. N., Ossipova, O., Kohlios, C. P., Baccarini, A. N., Howson, E. A., & Hayajneh, T. (2018) · Journal of Medical Systems · doi:10.1007/s10916-018-0982-x · Cited by 926
Blockchain smart contracts: Applications, challenges, and future trends
Khan, S. N., Loukil, F., Ghedira-Guegan, C., Benkhelifa, E., & Bani-Hani, A. (2021) · Peer-to-Peer Networking and Applications · doi:10.1007/s12083-021-01127-0 · Cited by 841
Smart Contract Development: Challenges and Opportunities
Zou, W., Lo, D., Kochhar, P. S., Le, X.-B. D., Xia, X., Feng, Y., Chen, Z., & Xu, B. (2021) · IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering · doi:10.1109/tse.2019.2942301 · Cited by 727
Federated learning meets blockchain in edge computing: Opportunities and challenges
Nguyen, D. C., Ding, M., Pham, Q.-V., Pathirana, P. N., Le, L. B., Seneviratne, A., Li, J., Niyato, D., & Poor, H. V. (2021) · IEEE Internet of Things Journal · doi:10.1109/jiot.2021.3072611 · Cited by 661
Chang, S. E., Chen, Y.-C., & Lu, M.-F. (2019) · Technological Forecasting and Social Change · doi:10.1016/j.techfore.2019.03.015 · Cited by 637
Cited by
AI Agents Meet Blockchain: A Survey on Secure and Scalable Collaboration for Multi-Agents
Karim, M. M., Van, D. H., Khan, S., Qu, Q., & Kholodov, Y. (2025) · Future Internet · doi:10.3390/fi17020057 · Cited by 73
Smart Contract Vulnerability Detection: The Role of Large Language Model (LLM)
Boi, B., Esposito, C., & Lee, S. (2024) · ACM SIGAPP Applied Computing Review · doi:10.1145/3687251.3687253 · Cited by 41
IoT and Blockchain for Support for Smart Contracts Through TpM
Yamaguti, R., Ferreira, L. C. B. C., Lui Motta, L., Montali Assumpção, R., Branquinho, O. C., Iervolino, G., & Cardieri, P. (2025) · Sensors · doi:10.3390/s25165001 · Cited by 4
“[21] emphasizes the potential uses of smart contracts and blockchain technology in various sectors, including healthcare, supply chain management, and energy.”
Influential
Metadata
- Authors
- Taherdoost, H.
- Venue
- Information
- Publisher
- MDPI AG
- Published
- 2023-02-13
- Volume
- 14
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 117
- ISSN
- 2078-2489 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W4320496187
- Cited by
- 355
- References
- 74
- FWCI
- 83.42
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Smart Contracts in Blockchain Technology: A Critical Review. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.3390/info14020117
- The paper
- Taherdoost, H. (2023). Smart Contracts in Blockchain Technology: A Critical Review. Information. https://doi.org/10.3390/info14020117
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
