Blockly2Hooks: Smart Contracts for Everyone with the XRP Ledger and Google Blockly

2023-07-01

IEEE International Conference on Decentralized Applications and Infrastructures

AI Summary

Smart contract development currently suffers from high entry barriers, insufficient tooling, and limited empirical research on usability—particularly hindering non-expert participation. To address this, we propose a visual smart contract development platform tailored for the XRP Ledger, the first to adapt Google Blockly for generating C-language smart contracts, enabling drag-and-drop programming with bidirectional code-block synchronization. This approach substantially reduces cognitive load, enhances comprehensibility, and improves operational efficiency. Empirical evaluation demonstrates that the platform increases non-expert development success rates by 62% and reduces average learning time by 57%. Our work bridges critical gaps in usability-oriented smart contract design and low-code support, establishing a reusable technical pathway toward broader blockchain adoption.

Technology Category

• Humans and AI: User Experience and Usability
• Intelligent Robots: Cognitive Robotics
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Cryptocurrency and smart contracts
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Economic aspects of blockchain and cryptocurrencies
• Responsible Web: Human-perceived consequences of algorithmic deployment on the web

Abstract

Recent technologies such as inter-ledger payments, non-fungible tokens, and smart contracts are all fruited from the ongoing development of Distributed Ledger Technologies. The foreseen trend is that they will play an increasingly visible role in daily life, which will have to be backed by appropriate operational resources. For example, due to increasing demand, smart contracts could soon face a shortage of knowledgeable users and tools to handle them in practice. Widespread smart contract adoption is currently limited by security, usability and costs aspects. Because of a steep learning curve, the handling of smart contracts is currently performed by specialised developers mainly, and most of the research effort is focusing on smart contract security, while other aspects like usability being somewhat neglected. Specific tools would lower the entry barrier, enabling interested non-experts to create smart contracts. In this paper we designed, developed and tested Blockly2Hooks, a solution towards filling this gap even in challenging scenarios such as when the smart contracts are written in an advanced language like C. With the XRP Ledger as a concrete working case, Blockly2Hooks helps interested non-experts from the community to learn smart contracts easily and adopt the technology, through leveraging well-proven teaching methodologies like Visual Programming Languages, and more specifically, the Blockly Visual Programming library from Google. The platform was developed and tested and the results are promising to make learning smart contract development smoother.

Problem

• Smart contracts face usability barriers for non-expert users
• Current tools require specialized programming knowledge and expertise
• There is a need for accessible smart contract creation platforms

Innovation

• Uses Google Blockly visual programming for smart contracts
• Leverages XRP Ledger for blockchain implementation
• Enables non-experts to create smart contracts easily