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SigVM: Enabling Event-Driven Execution for Autonomous Smart Contracts

Programming Languages 2021-11-18 v2 Cryptography and Security

Abstract

This paper presents SigVM, a novel blockchain virtual machine that supports an event-driven execution model, enabling developers to build autonomous smart contracts. Contracts in SigVM can emit signal events, on which other contracts can listen. Once an event is triggered, corresponding handler functions are automatically executed as signal transactions. We build an end-to-end blockchain platform SigChain and a contract language compiler SigSolid to realize the potential of SigVM. Experimental results show that our benchmark applications can be reimplemented with SigVM in an autonomous way, eliminating the dependency on unreliable mechanisms like off-chain relay servers. The development effort of reimplementing these contracts with SigVM is small, i.e., we modified on average 2.6% of the contract code.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2102.10784,
  title  = {SigVM: Enabling Event-Driven Execution for Autonomous Smart Contracts},
  author = {Zihan Zhao and Sidi Mohamed Beillahi and Ryan Song and Yuxi Cai and Andreas Veneris and Fan Long},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2102.10784},
  year   = {2021}
}

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14 Pages

R2 v1 2026-06-23T23:23:08.673Z