  Blockchain-based platforms are emerging as a transformative technology that
can provide reliability, integrity, and auditability without trusted entities.
One of the key features of these platforms is the trustworthy decentralized
execution of general-purpose computation in the form of smart contracts, which
are envisioned to have a wide range of applications. As a result, a rapidly
growing and active community of smart-contract developers has emerged in recent
years. A number of research efforts have investigated the technological
challenges that these developers face, introducing a variety of tools,
languages, and frameworks for smart-contract development, focusing on security.
However, relatively little is known about the community itself, about the
developers, and about the issues that they face and discuss. To address this
gap, we study smart-contract developers and their discussions on two social
media sites, Stack Exchange and Medium. We provide insight into the trends and
key topics of these discussions, into the developers' interest in various
security issues and security tools, and into the developers' technological
background.

Computers and Society;Cryptography and Security;Software Engineering