SmartPayment: an undergraduate thesis brings smart contracts to developer evaluation
João Pedro Elias de Moura defended at FCTE/UnB an undergraduate thesis designing SmartPayment — a smart-contract-based system to automate assessment and payment in software development.
Brasília, July 11, 2025
Blockchain, smart contracts, and digital currencies are no longer exotic terms — but they remain hard to operationalize in concrete contexts. The undergraduate thesis defended in July 2025 by João Pedro Elias de Moura attacks a specific case: assessment and payment in software development projects, under the advising of Prof. Daniel Sundfeld Lima .
SmartPayment — the artifact that runs through the work — combines smart-contract logic with the usual flow of approving and paying deliveries in a software project. The idea is to reduce audit and dispute friction: the contract executes automatically according to verifiable criteria, with security and transparency granted by the chain. The domain choice matters: software development is precisely the one where deliveries are easy to fragment, hard to evaluate objectively, and often the focus of contractual disputes.
By pairing software architecture with agreement automation, the thesis contributes to a discussion the blockchain community must address with rigor: which use cases actually justify the added complexity, and how to design contracts that respond to exceptions without becoming themselves a source of dispute.
The full text — written in Portuguese — is available at the UnB Undergraduate Theses Digital Library.
About CEDIS: The Center for Studies, Development, and Innovation in Software (CEDIS), linked to the University of Brasília, researches and develops innovative software solutions.