Smart contracts and the law: Tech developments challenge legal community
Regulators will be challenged to respond to and address smart contracts, as they represent a cross section of law and technology. Smart contracts are an important element of the blockchain revolution, although they predate blockchain. According to most sources, it was Nick Szabo who coined the term “smart contract” in the 1990s. The mechanism of a vending machine has since been frequently given as an example of a basic smart contract based on if-then logic. The payment into a vending machine triggers an irrevocable automated action from when money is retained to when an item is....
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Smart contracts present one the most promising tech solutions for business, but there are still barriers that have to be addressed. The internet is buzzing over recent developments in decentralized finance, or DeFi — smart contracts are hotter than ever. You might think you missed the coronation ceremony, but smart contracts are actually used in only a small corner of the crypto world, albeit a corner worth billions of dollars. It’s a promising concept that has gone widely unused in the business world.Despite the headlines and in spite of crypto-cloistering, smart contracts are not....
“The Law Commission’s analysis demonstrates the flexibility of the common law to accommodate technological developments, particularly in the context of smart legal contracts,” said the announcement. The U.K. Law Commission, tasked with monitoring the laws in the United Kingdom and recommending reforms, has said England and Wales do not need statutory law reform for smart legal contracts in the digital asset space.In a Thursday announcement, the commission said smart contracts built using distributed ledger technology are permissible within England’s and Wales’ current legal framework. 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,....
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....
Ethereum’s community is standing up to the challenge of securing smart contracts by taking steps to implement the lessons learned from the DAO. Microsoft Research, Harvard University and Inra, a French national research institute that employs 2700 computer science researchers from the “world’s most prestigious universities”, have published a highly technical paper [PDF] on the formal verification of smart contracts. The paper presents a framework to analyze and formally verify Ethereum smart contracts using F*, a “functional programming language aimed at program verification.” The initial....