Blockchain Smart Contracts Need a New Kind of Due Diligence
More than 20 years ago, Nick Szabo proposed the use of a 'smart contract' to reduce fraud and enforcement costs associated with traditional paper contracts. His smart contract would be implemented as a “computerized transaction protocol that executes the terms of a contract” – in other words, a computer program. Like any other software, a 'smart contract' computer program would receive inputs, run a series of program steps, and supply outputs. For example, the smart contract could wait for a predetermined condition to occur (eg: a stock reaches a particular price), automatically deem the....
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Trustatom, a Canadian company that provides blockchain-powered smart contracts, has raised early seed funding from a group of angel investors. The company is preparing to launch an investment due diligence SaaS, called CredyCo, powered by its proprietary technology stack and the blockchain. The internet has provided a great way for parties to transact efficiently, prompting truly fascinating use cases, but the remaining key challenge is the need for mutual trust. To address this, Trustatom brings the trust mechanics that made Bitcoin possible into the mainstream.
By raising $1 million in seed funding, blockchain startup RSK Labs will develop Rootstock, a smart contracts platform that will be deployed as a sidechain on the bitcoin blockchain. In a funding round led by bitcoin mining hardware company Bitmain Technology, RSK Labs has raised $1 million in a successful initial seeding round to develop Rootstock – a smart contracts platform secured by the bitcoin blockchain. The funding round was supported by London-based blockchain investment firm Coinsilium and New York-based bitcoin- and blockchain-investor Digital Currency Group. The first of its....
Hackers are soon going to be the new lawyers as the adoption of smart contracts increase in the near future. The advent of Blockchain 2.0 and Blockchain 3.0 has given rise to new ways of automation using Bitcoin’s underlying technology. There are special cryptocurrency platforms like Ethereum, Rootstock, Counterparty, Lisk and more that allows people to create smart contracts on the blockchain. These smart contracts enable automation by allowing developers to set trigger conditions. These trigger conditions are certain prerequisites, when met, will execute the function programmed on the....
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....
Susanne Tarkowski Tempelhof, Founder and CEO of Bitnation, explains to Cointelegraph how smart contracts can lower costs of your business. Cointelegraph: What are Smart Contracts about? Susanne Tarkowski: Smart contracts are applications ‘living on’ the Blockchain, and therefore can’t be censored. Simple, immutable and autonomous applications, basically. As Primavera de Filippi eloquently phrased it during her talk at OuiShare Paris 2016 “Smart Contracts are neither smart nor contracts...”. But ironically, smart contracts are however ideally suited to be… well… contracts! In essence, your....