The development of blockchain technologies has enabled the trustless
execution of so-called smart contracts, i.e. programs that regulate the
exchange of assets (e.g., cryptocurrency) between users. In a decentralized
blockchain, the state of smart contracts is collaboratively maintained by a
peer-to-peer network of mutually untrusted nodes, which collect from users a
set of transactions (representing the required actions on contracts), and
execute them in some order. Once this sequence of transactions is appended to
the blockchain, the other nodes validate it, re-executing the transactions in
the same order. The serial execution of transactions does not take advantage of
the multi-core architecture of modern processors, so contributing to limit the
throughput. In this paper we propose a true concurrent model of smart contract
execution. Based on this, we show how static analysis of smart contracts can be
exploited to parallelize the execution of transactions.Comment: Full version of the paper presented at COORDINATION 202