How a Researcher in the US is Transforming Blockchain Transactions

  A doctoral researcher at North Carolina State University, Raleigh, USA, Habib Itopa Mohammed, has developed a transformative approach to improving blockchain efficiency through native transaction primitives. The blockchain research could mark a major shift in how smart contracts are implemented and optimized across decentralized applications. This development was revealed following the publication of the […]

 

A doctoral researcher at North Carolina State University, Raleigh, USA, Habib Itopa Mohammed, has developed a transformative approach to improving blockchain efficiency through native transaction primitives.

The blockchain research could mark a major shift in how smart contracts are implemented and optimized across decentralized applications.

This development was revealed following the publication of the paper titled “Taming Smart Contracts With Blockchain Transaction Primitives: A Possibility?” at the 2024 IEEE ICBC Blockchain Conference.

North Carolina State University is a recognized hub for cutting-edge blockchain research and hosts leading faculty in the area of decentralized systems. The institution received support from CISCO and the U.S. National Science Foundation to advance the study.

Prior to his doctoral studies in the United States, Habib served as a lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, one of Nigeria’s leading academic institutions. His teaching and research at ABU laid a strong foundation for his current work on decentralized technologies.

Habib’s research highlights a pervasive challenge in the blockchain ecosystem, which involves the repetition of common transaction behaviors in smart contracts, such as deposit, mint, and buy functions, which developers are forced to reimplement with every project. “We found that many smart contracts share core behaviors that can be standardized,” Habib said. “This opens the door for blockchains to support these as native primitives, just as databases support reusable SQL operators.”

Habib’s contribution included designing the analysis framework, leading the method clustering strategy, and evaluating metrics such as transaction frequency and spread across contracts to assess the potential for lifting these behaviors into system-level support.

According to the study, transaction types like mint and buy appeared not only frequently but also consistently across diverse smart contracts. This consistency suggests the feasibility of defining system-supported versions of these transactions, reducing bugs, improving scalability, and lowering costs.

The team proposes that incorporating these primitives at the blockchain protocol layer would yield improved performance, stronger security, and better developer experience.

Habib is conducting this research under the guidance of the Department of Computer Science at North Carolina State University, which also houses multiple collaborative initiatives in blockchain technology and smart contract security.

With over 637 million smart contracts on Ethereum alone, the implications of this research could significantly influence blockchain standardization and platform robustness.

Habib said, “Our goal is to make blockchain more usable, scalable, and secure. By lifting commonly used behaviors out of smart contracts into the core platform, we can eliminate redundancy and reduce errors.”

His work stands as a promising direction in the effort to build smarter, safer, and more efficient decentralized system