# Investigation on Self-Admitted Technical Debt in Open-Source Blockchain Projects
## 5 Discussion  
The detection of SATD in blockchain projects has made it possible to evaluate the presence of two types of SATD, i.e., requirement and design, in ten selected projects. The results examined in the previous section allow us to answer RQ1: the findings reveal the common existence of SATD in the selected blockchain software systems, revealing and making visible a part of TD that should be paid off. Results showed the amount of SATD detected and evaluated its presence both at the level of comments and at the level of files. What emerges is that a percentage of comments between 7.13% and 11.40% was detected as SATD. As far as files are concerned, this percentage varies between 14.5% and 41.09%. In projects where the SATD is distributed over many files (Bitcoin, XRP, Polkadot, and Cardano), the TD is distributed over a larger portion of the project. This can be problematic for long-term project maintainability if the development team does not adopt a TD monitoring strategy. In these projects, the identification of the TD through SATD is particularly useful as it allows to precisely locate the points of accumulation of TD and intervene for its removal. The Bitcoin and Polkadot projects, while not having the highest \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c c c} \hline \hline \multirow{2}{*}{**Project**} & \multirow{2}{*}{**Contributors**} & \multicolumn{3}{c}{**Number of**} & **Number of** \\  & & **Effective** & **SATD** & **SATD Requirement** & **Percentage** \\  & & **Comments** & **Design** & **quement** & **of SATD** \\ \hline Ant & 74 & 4137 & 95 & 12 & 2.58\% \\ ArgoUML & 87 & 9548 & 801 & 411 & 12.69\% \\ Columba & 9 & 6478 & 125 & 42 & 2.57\% \\ EMF & 30 & 4401 & 78 & 16 & 2.13\% \\ Hibernate & 226 & 2968 & 355 & 64 & 14.11\% \\ JEdit & 57 & 10,322 & 196 & 14 & 2.05\% \\ JFreeChart & 19 & 4423 & 184 & 15 & 4.49\% \\ JMeter & 33 & 8162 & 316 & 21 & 4.12\% \\ JRuby & 328 & 4897 & 343 & 110 & 9.25\% \\ SQuirrel & 46 & 7230 & 209 & 50 & 3.58\% \\ \hline Total & 909 & 62,566 & 2702 & 755 & - \\ Average & 91 & 6256.6 & 270.2 & 75.5 & 5.52\% \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 11: Results of SATD Detection in Open-Source Java Projects form [11]. percentage of SATD in comments, have a higher diffusion of SATD comments in files. This may require more future work to maintain and improve those projects. Thanks to the results obtained in the comparison phase, it is also possible to answer RQ2. Blockchain projects have a higher average SATD percentage detected and are more evenly distributed than the projects in the reference study. It was also found that in blockchain projects, the detection rate of the SATD Design is less dominant than in the projects of the reference study. This indicates that blockchain developers are more likely to report inconsistencies between their implementation and project requirements. The results of this study allow us to observe that blockchain projects have a greater presence of SATD than the reference projects. This means that the developers of the blockchain projects are accumulating technical debt, and some of this is being detected through the identification of the SATD [15]. The high presence of SATD in blockchain projects can be seen as a threat to the bond of trust that must be generated between the blockchain system and the users for the project to be successful. For this reason, blockchain project development teams can benefit from SATD detection. The detection results allow the development team to locate the source of TD in the code and understand the problem that generated it thanks to the comment left by the developer. Therefore, the detection of the SATD can be seen as a practice to allow the development team to make the payment of the TD (or its removal) faster and more punctual [14]. The SATD detection result can be used to monitor TD and gain insight into which aspects of blockchain projects require the most attention in order to be maintained and improved.