A Blockchain-Based Smart Contract Towards Developing Secured University Examination System

A smart contract (SC) is a digital negotiation protocol among two or more anonymous parties without the presence of any trusted intermediaries. It is a self-executing agreement in the form of computer code. Smart contracts run on the blockchain. Thus, the code and the agreement are stored on a distributed public database and cannot be changed. There is a broad range of prospective application scenarios for smart contracts in the digital economy, including financial services, management, healthcare, and the Internet of Things. Ethereum and Hyperledger, are two of the most widely used open-source advance cross-industry blockchain technologies. Major technical challenges such as security, privacy, correctness, and verifiability are among the issues that are yet to be matured and completely resolved for blockchain. In this work, a comprehensive survey on smart contracts is carried out. We also present a case study on a University examination system having a heterogeneous data structure. This deployment brings a comprehensive understanding of the smart contract framework and has been used to find and analyze the gaps in the state of the art in terms of smart contracts. © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021.