Discreet Log Contracts
Smart contracts are an often touted feature of cryptographic currency systems such as Bitcoin, but they have yet to see widespread financial use.
Two of the biggest hurdles to their implementation and adoption have been scalability of the smart contracts, and the difficulty in getting data external to the currency system into the smart contract. Privacy of the contract has been another issue to date.
In this paper, DCI research scientist Tadge Dryja presents Discreet Log Contracts, a system which addresses the scalability and privacy concerns and seeks to minimize the trust required in the oracle which provides external data. The contracts are discreet in that external observers cannot detect the presence of the contract in the transaction log. They also hinge on knowledge of a discrete logarithm, which is a plus.