From the Blockchain to Logic Programming and back: Research perspectives

The blockchain is a novel approach to support distributed systems enabling a common, consistent view of a shared state among distributed nodes. There, smart contracts are computer programs that allow users to deploy arbitrary computations, in charge of automatically regulate state transitions and enforce properties. In this paper we speculate on how the blockchain and smart contracts could take advantage of a logic programming approach, and, complementarily, on how logic programming can benefit from the blockchain infrastructure. Accordingly, we discuss some possible research directions and open questions for future research.