Auditability in Privacy-Preserving Smart Contracts

Blockchain-based smart contracts enable decentralized and tamper-resistant execution of digital agreements, fostering transparency and automation across diverse application domains. However, the increasing demand for privacy-preserving mechanisms – such as zero-knowledge proofs, secure multi-party computation, and confidential computing – introduces significant challenges to traditional notions of auditability. In many real-world scenarios, including finance, healthcare, and supply chain management, it is essential to ensure that smart contracts remain verifiable and compliant without exposing sensitive data. This tension between privacy and auditability has motivated the development of novel techniques, processes and system architectures that aim to reconcile these seemingly conflicting requirements. As privacy-enhancing technologies become more prevalent in blockchain ecosystems, understanding how to design auditable yet privacy-preserving smart contracts has emerged as a critical research direction.

The goal of this Research Topic is to address the fundamental challenge of enabling robust auditability in smart contracts while preserving the confidentiality of sensitive data. As privacy-preserving techniques become integral to blockchain systems, auditing approaches are of utmost importance. This creates a critical need for new methods that allow stakeholders, regulators, and third-party auditors to verify correctness, compliance, and accountability without accessing underlying private information.

To achieve this, this Research Topic seeks contributions that explore novel secure primitives/processes (e.g., remote attestation), trusted execution environments (TEEs), and verifiable computation techniques that support auditable workflows under privacy constraints. Additionally, it encourages research on formal verification, policy enforcement, and standardized auditing frameworks tailored to privacy-preserving smart contracts. Practical implementations, performance evaluations, and real-world use cases are particularly welcome, as they help bridge the gap between theory and deployment. Ultimately, this Research Topic aims to advance the design of trustworthy, compliant, and privacy-aware smart contract ecosystems.

This Research Topic focuses on theoretical foundations, practical implementations, and real-world applications of auditability in privacy-preserving smart contracts. We welcome contributions addressing, but not limited to, the following themes:
- cryptographic techniques for auditable privacy (e.g., zero-knowledge proofs, secure multi-party computation, homomorphic encryption);
- verifiable and accountable smart contract execution;
- formal verification and auditing frameworks;
- compliance and regulatory considerations in privacy-preserving blockchain systems;
- secure logging and traceability mechanisms;
- performance and scalability trade-offs in auditable privacy solutions.

Submissions exploring emerging paradigms such as confidential decentralized finance (DeFi), privacy-preserving identity management, and cross-chain auditing are also encouraged. We invite a range of manuscript types, including Original Research articles, Reviews, Methods, and Perspective papers, particularly those that bridge theory and practice or demonstrate applicability in real-world scenarios.

Article types and fees

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Community Case Study
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• FAIR² DATA Direct Submission
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• ... View all formats

Articles that are accepted for publication by our external editors following rigorous peer review incur a publishing fee charged to Authors, institutions, or funders.

Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Community Case Study
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• FAIR² DATA Direct Submission
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Policy and Practice Reviews
• Policy Brief
• Review
• Systematic Review
• Technology and Code

Keywords: verification, integrity, formal methods, validity, trust

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.