Blockchain for Trustworthy Coordination: A First Study with LINDA and Ethereum

Blockchain technologies are rapidly gaining attention in the multi-agent system (MAS) community, mostly to face critical issues such as trust, secured communications, and data consistency. In particular, the notion of smart contract can be exploited to deploy trustworthy computations automatically executed by the network in a consistent way. MAS coordination – modelling and engineering agent interaction in a MAS – potentially represents an appealing application field for smart contracts, possibly drawing a path towards fully-decentralised, trustworthy coordination. Along that line, we focus on the Ethereum blockchain technology, map it onto tuple-based coordination, and discuss two proof-of-concept implementations of the archetypal Linda coordination model. By doing so, we demonstrate feasibility of blockchain-based MAS coordination, and also point out some general issues arising when applying the blockchain beyond accountability and identity management.