Evaluating Capabilities and Perspectives of Generative AI Tools in Smart Contract Development

Smart contracts, self-executing agreements on the blockchain, have emerged as a transformative force in blockchain technology, automating agreements and enabling decentralized applications. However, the stakes are extraordinarily high—manual coding errors in smart contracts have repeatedly led to financial losses. Notable incidents, such as the DAO hack that resulted in a loss of approximately $50 million [36] and the Parity wallet vulnerability that froze approximately $280 million in assets [45], underscore the immense economic risks involved. To support manual development tasks, recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) powered by large language models (LLMs) have transformed how software is developed and maintained by automating various software engineering tasks. This research explores the capabilities of generative AI tools for efficient and secure smart contract development. The methodology involves two phases: 1) we distribute a mixed methods survey for blockchain and smart contract developers (𝑛 = 114) to investigate their perspectives towards utilizing LLMs; and 2) we evaluate the effectiveness of generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and ChainGPT, for smart contract development. This evaluation is based on comparing the LLM-generated smart contract code with human-written code, using a diverse dataset of smart contracts gathered from GitHub. Static analysis tools and unit testing are employed to validate the accuracy, correctness, efficiency, and security of the generated code. Our findings highlight the potential of these tools to accelerate smart contract development processes, while also emphasizing the need for human oversight, contributing to the advancement of blockchain technology and its applications.