Exploring Human-Centric Dimensions in Blockchain Smart Contracts
Hanouf Al Ghanmi, Sabreen Ahmadjee, Rami Bahsoon, Hayatullahi Bolaji Adeyemo · ACM Computing Surveys · 2025
Blockchain smart contract technology has revolutionised various industries by automating agreements through immutable and self-executing logic, reducing reliance on third-party intermediaries. However, despite its transformative potential, existing research has predominantly focused on technical aspects—particularly security—while largely neglecting human-in-the-loop concerns. Systematic efforts to explore these concerns from a human perspective have been limited which creates a gap in the literature. This study aims to address this gap by offering a comprehensive understanding of smart contracts from a human-centred perspective. To achieve this, we conducted a systematic literature review to examine human-related issues in smart contracts and their existing solutions. We found that concerns are primarily concentrated in two stages: development and interaction. During the development stage, issues arise in relation to programming languages, including complexity, readability and expressiveness, as well as the legality of smart contracts and their ethical and social implications. In the interaction stage, concerns focus on usability, human readability, trust, governance and cost. Additionally, we identified several quality attributes frequently associated with these concerns such as transparency, accountability, understandability, simplicity, learnability, compliance and fairness. We also uncovered new human-centred quality attributes that are overlooked in existing literature, such as explainability and interpretability. This research offers valuable insights for researchers, requirements engineers and designers by examining existing efforts to address human-centric concerns and proposing future directions and opportunities to improve smart contract design.