Smart Contracts and Decentralized Applications

Abstract

A chapter examining how self-executing smart contracts and the decentralized applications built on them reshape trust on distributed ledgers — covering their cryptographic foundations, execution model, common design and security pitfalls, and the practical role they play at the intersection of blockchain and artificial intelligence.

This page is a summary landing page for the published chapter. The complete, peer-reviewed text is available from the publisher via the DOI.

Overview

Smart contracts are programs that execute automatically when predefined conditions are met, recorded immutably on a blockchain. By moving enforcement from intermediaries into deterministic code, they enable decentralized applications (dApps) whose behaviour is transparent and verifiable by anyone.

This chapter, published in The Confluence of Cryptography, Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence (CRC Press, 2025), situates smart contracts within the broader cryptographic and distributed-systems landscape.

What the chapter covers

Cryptographic foundations — hashing, digital signatures and the consensus guarantees that make on-chain agreements tamper-evident.
Execution model — how contract code is deployed, invoked and settled, and what "gas" and determinism imply for application design.
Design and security considerations — recurring pitfalls (reentrancy, access-control gaps, oracle trust) and the practices that mitigate them.
Convergence with AI — where machine-learning workloads and decentralized infrastructure meet, and the open problems that remain.

Citation

Agnihotri, A., Pandey, A., Verma, R., & Dhanda, N. (2025). Smart Contracts and Decentralized Applications. In The Confluence of Cryptography, Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence. CRC Press. https://doi.org/10.1201/9781032711515-8

For the full manuscript, please refer to the publisher via the DOI above.