Why Smart Contracts Will Need 'Smart Term Sheets' to Match
In a new world of smart contracts, many expect that formal written contracts, and the lawyers that draft them, will be obsolete. It is presumed that the agreed-upon term sheet will be simply given to a software developer to convert into smart contract computer code.That code will be the final agreement. But what does a software developer know about drafting code to implement a traditional term sheet? The negotiating parties know their deal, and the lawyers know the applicable law and the customary terms, but the software developer does not. A traditional term sheet is not enough. A “smart....
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As the developer of a popular blockchain platform, I sometimes gets asked whether Ethereum-like smart contracts are on the MultiChain roadmap. The answer I always give is always: 'No, or at least not yet'. But in the hype-filled world of blockchains, smart contracts are all the rage, so why ever not? Well, the problem is, while we now know of three strong use cases for permissioned bitcoin-style blockchains (provenance, company recordkeeping and lightweight finance), we've yet to find the equivalent for Ethereum smart contracts. It's not that people don't understand what they want smart....
Smart contracts have been in the crypto space for quite a while now, most recently debuting on Cardano. With the rise of decentralized finance (DeFi), smart contracts have become even more important to the entire industry. This is because they are required to build the protocols on which these decentralized applications (DApps) run on. As they have grown in popularity, smart contracts platforms like Ethereum and Solana have recorded great success with them. Cardano has been working on bringing smart contracts to its network for a while and on September 12th, that dream became a reality....
Smart contracts can automate many different kinds of processes and operations, the most obvious being payment and actions conditional on payment. But the capabilities extend to many business and organizational activities. A white paper [PDF] by the Chamber of Digital Commerce with the support of the Smart Contracts Alliance presents 12 use cases of contracts for business and beyond. Nick Szabo in 1996 described a smart contract as “a set of promises, specified in digital form, including protocols within which the parties perform on these promises,” a definition that still describes the....
With contributions from Zerado, FinTech Network have produced a whitepaper that looks at smart contracts and how they could improve efficiencies within the banking sector. The whitepaper highlights: How smart contracts aim to provide security that is superior to traditional contract law and ways they can reduce other transactional and administrative costs. The workings of Ethereum as one of the best examples of smart contracts in practice. Ways that smart contracts could benefit areas such as mortgages, clearing and settlement, KYC & bonds. How challenges with conceptual misalignment,....
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....