UNICORE Use Case: Smart Contract Execution on Unikernels

A smart contract is a program that keeps state of promises that are executed when the involved parties fulfill the terms. The main challenges for smart contracts in a blockchain environment are ensuring deterministic execution support, because all participants need to be able to verify the result of a smart contract; safe running of untrusted code, to avoid security issues on the nodes involved in the system; and handling the interaction between smart contracts.

The DEDIS lab at EPFL created a permissioned blockchain called skipchain that includes precompiled smart contracts, but that lacks so far the possibility to run smart contracts provided by the users. UNICORE will enable secure, deterministic execution of smart contracts that will open an entire new field of application and can potentially change many aspects of society, such as e-voting.