Smart Contract Visualization: Solutions and Challenges

The advent of distributed ledger technology across various sectors highlighted its potential to revolutionize conventional processes and systems. In particular, smart contracts emerged as disruptive innovation, automating legal contract clauses between parties. However, smart contract development is not an easy task and raises nontrivial challenges to non-programmers since they need to have specialized programming skills and deep understanding of blockchain technology. These challenges reduce user engagement and increase the possibility of introducing bugs and vulnerabilities that can lead to huge financial loss. To address these complexities, visual programming has emerged as the main solution among researchers since it is a well-proven methodology to improve and lower the learning curve of a new programming language and create a working piece of code in a user-friendly way. This paper aims to assess the visual formalism and representation that have been used in academia to represent smart contracts in an easy-to-understand manner. The findings show a clear evolution in visualization approaches, with Business Process Model Notation (BPMN) emerging as the dominant methodology (35%) in recent years. Behavioral visualizations (52.5%) have increasingly replaced structural representations (37.5%) as the field matures, whereas evolution-focused approaches remain underexplored (10%). Despite balanced accessibility requirements across user expertise levels, only 20% of studies incorporate formal UX testing, suggesting significant opportunities to improve user-centered design in the visualization of smart contracts.