Making Sense of Blockchain Smart Contracts
The term “smart contract” has no clear and settled definition. The idea has long been hyped to the public as a central component of next-generation blockchain platforms, and as a key capability for any practical enterprise application. They are defined variously as “autonomous machines”, “contracts between parties stored on a blockchain” or “any computation that takes place on a blockchain”. Many debates about the nature of smart contracts are really just contests between competing terminology. The different definitions usually fall into one of two categories. Sometimes the term is used to....
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Smart contracts are a key underpinning of blockchain technology, yet they are still misunderstood in many ways. In the fullness of their deployment, they will be no less revolutionary than the invention of the HTML markup language that allowed information to be openly published and linked on the Web. Smart contracts promise to program our world on the head of blockchains, and potentially replace many functions currently executed by expensive or slow intermediaries. Historically, the concept was first introduced by Nick Szabo in 1994. Smart contracts then had a long gestation period of....
As the developers of MultiChain, a popular general-purpose blockchain platform, we've gained a fairly broad view of the types of applications that people are building on this new class of database. And we also have a sense of whether those applications are a good fit for blockchains as an architecture, and if so, how soon they are likely to move from proof-of-concept to pilot and production. For a startup with limited resources, these distinctions are crucial – they ensure that MultiChain's product roadmap is driven by genuine rather than artificial needs. One glaring example is....
Business accelerators all over the world are always looking for the next big thing in technology and finance. It only makes sense to see these accelerators keeping an eye out for companies exploring blockchain technology. Or in the case of BNP Paribas, they are looking at one startup in particular – called CommonAccord – which aims to bring automated....
If you have no idea what a cryptocurrency is and never heard of Ethereum, then this is the right post for you. Ethereum, you would have heard about it by now. If not, then I guess you have been out of touch with the cryptocurrency industry for a while or you are really new to it. Well, don’t worry we will get you up to speed in this article. What is Ethereum? It is a relatively new cryptocurrency that is making waves in the cryptocurrency ecosystem. Unlike bitcoin, it is designed to be a smart contract platform based on the blockchain technology. The crypto tokens on this platform are....
Smart contracts are one of the hottest trends in the world of digital currency and blockchain technology today, which is also attracting a lot of attention from startups and entrepreneurs. RSK Labs is one of these companies looking to introduce smart contracts by using the Bitcoin blockchain, and they have recently raised $1 million USD in seed funding....