An Ontology for Smart Contracts

This paper introduces a basic ontology that attempts to capture the essential features of many smart contracts, in order to aid in formal reasoning about their behavior. Section II gives a general overview of the proposed ontology, and Section III gives analyses of a number of interesting smart contracts from the literature, through the lens of this ontology. The proposals here are not intended to be the One True Ontology, but rather a useful ontology. A well-designed blockchain should be able to support arbitrary such ontologies