Analysis of Users' Most Discussed Topics and Trends on Blockchain Technologies and Smart Contracts

Nowadays, blockchain technology and smart contracts (SCs) spread as hot computer science and finance topics, catching the interest of a heterogeneous range of users. Thinking about blockchain technologies, users can choose between a broad set of alternatives, like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Hyperledger Fabric, Cardano, and many others. The choice of a blockchain platform over another relies on the user's purpose. For what concerns smart contracts programming, Ethereum is still the most popular platform despite other popular blockchain technologies recently increasing their popularity for SCs development, such as Algorand, Stellar, Hyperledger Fabric, and many others. Such a tremendous number of alternatives makes it difficult to keep track of blockchain trends and use cases of the different technologies. This work explores users' most discussed topics and opinions about popular blockchain technologies, focusing on smart contracts development, taking advantage of topic modeling techniques, and in particular, taking advantage of the BERT model. The primary data source is Reddit, which was proven to provide different and exciting blockchain topics. The chosen blockchain platform are four of the most popular platforms for SCs development. These technologies include Ethereum, Stellar, Algorand, and Hyperledger Fabric. The analysis of 14.156 subreddits highlighted several exciting topics, such as smart contracts auditing, currency inflation, comparisons between crypto, and general blockchain trends. The most present arguments concern Stellar trends, comparisons between Stellar and Ripple, which Wallet to use to store tokens and crypto, SCs auditing, and Ethereum trends.