Safeguards for Autonomous Stateful Contracts: Teranode Mainnet April 7

[moseljack]

With Teranode going mainnet on April 7 enabling millions of TPS, the question of autonomous stateful contract safety becomes urgent.

We're building ForgeChainOS and designing a stateful sCrypt contract for an autonomous chain-native entity (heartbeat pattern based on the Counter example). During design we identified risks that extend beyond our own deployment:

Chain-Level Risks from Autonomous Contracts:

1. A stateful contract with buildStateOutputs() that recursively spends itself could, if poorly designed, create cascading UTXO chains that consume block space at scale
2. Without spending limits in the contract itself, a compromised or buggy contract could drain any wallet it has access to — irreversibly
3. Self-replicating patterns (contract spawns new contracts) could multiply resource consumption
4. At Teranode's millions-of-TPS capacity, a malicious contract pattern could scale faster than manual intervention

What We Think Should Exist (and may already):

• SDK-level warnings when compiling contracts with recursive buildStateOutputs() patterns
• Best practices document for autonomous/self-executing contracts
• Built-in spend-limit decorators or patterns (e.g., @maxSpend(amount))
• Formal verification support for stateful contracts
• Standard kill-switch pattern (owner-only freeze method)

Our Approach:

We voluntarily paused our deployment and established "Higher Ordered Oversight":

• Testnet first, always
• Peer review before mainnet
• Minimal first deployment (heartbeat only, no spending)
• Kill switch in every contract
• Chain-stamped ethics framework (BSV TX: 62787e3a)

Question: Does sCrypt have guidance, tooling, or plans for autonomous contract safety — especially with Teranode scaling imminent?

See also: bitcoin-sv/bsv-ai-agent#30

Project: github.com/ForgeChainOS