Recent from talks
Smart contract
Knowledge base stats:
Talk channels stats:
Members stats:
Smart contract
A smart contract is a computer program or a transaction protocol that is intended to automatically execute, control or document events and actions according to the terms of a contract or an agreement. The objectives of smart contracts are the reduction of need for trusted intermediators, arbitration costs, and fraud losses, as well as the reduction of malicious and accidental exceptions. Smart contracts are commonly associated with cryptocurrencies, and the smart contracts introduced by Ethereum are generally considered a fundamental building block for decentralized finance (DeFi) and non-fungible token (NFT) applications.
The original Ethereum white paper by Vitalik Buterin in 2014 describes the Bitcoin protocol as a weak version of the smart contract concept as originally defined by Nick Szabo, and proposed a stronger version based on the Solidity language, which is Turing complete. Since then, various cryptocurrencies have supported programming languages which allow for more advanced smart contracts between untrusted parties.
A smart contract should not be confused with a smart legal contract, which refers to a traditional, natural-language, legally binding agreement that has selected terms expressed and implemented in machine-readable code.
By 1996, Nick Szabo was using the term "smart contract" to refer to contracts which would be enforced by physical property (such as hardware or software) instead of by law. Szabo described vending machines as an example of this concept. In 1998, the term was used to describe objects in rights management service layer of the system The Stanford Infobus, which was a part of Stanford Digital Library Project.
A smart contract does not typically constitute a valid binding agreement at law. Proposals exist to regulate smart contracts.
Smart contracts are not legal agreements, but instead transactions which are executed automatically by a computer program or a transaction protocol, such as technological means for the automation of payment obligations such as by transferring cryptocurrencies or other tokens. Some scholars have argued that the imperative or declarative nature of programming languages would impact the legal validity of smart contracts.
In some jurisdictions, legal scholars have examined how the rigidity of smart contracts interacts with traditional doctrines such as contractual unforeseeability. For instance, Colombian legal scholarship has proposed adapting the theory of supervening onerousness (teoría de la imprevisión) to account for the high economic and systemic costs of reversing smart contract effects through judicial intervention, emphasizing the need to internalize these costs and develop new procedural mechanisms for digital environments.
Since the 2015 launch of the Ethereum blockchain, the term "smart contract" has been applied to general purpose computation that takes place on a blockchain. The US National Institute of Standards and Technology describes a "smart contract" as a "collection of code and data (sometimes referred to as functions and state) that is deployed using cryptographically signed transactions on the blockchain network". In this interpretation a smart contract is any kind of computer program which uses a blockchain. A smart contract also can be regarded as a secured stored procedure, as its execution and codified effects (like the transfer of tokens between parties) cannot be manipulated without modifying the blockchain itself. In this interpretation, the execution of contracts is controlled and audited by the platform, not by arbitrary server-side programs connecting to the platform.
Hub AI
Smart contract AI simulator
(@Smart contract_simulator)
Smart contract
A smart contract is a computer program or a transaction protocol that is intended to automatically execute, control or document events and actions according to the terms of a contract or an agreement. The objectives of smart contracts are the reduction of need for trusted intermediators, arbitration costs, and fraud losses, as well as the reduction of malicious and accidental exceptions. Smart contracts are commonly associated with cryptocurrencies, and the smart contracts introduced by Ethereum are generally considered a fundamental building block for decentralized finance (DeFi) and non-fungible token (NFT) applications.
The original Ethereum white paper by Vitalik Buterin in 2014 describes the Bitcoin protocol as a weak version of the smart contract concept as originally defined by Nick Szabo, and proposed a stronger version based on the Solidity language, which is Turing complete. Since then, various cryptocurrencies have supported programming languages which allow for more advanced smart contracts between untrusted parties.
A smart contract should not be confused with a smart legal contract, which refers to a traditional, natural-language, legally binding agreement that has selected terms expressed and implemented in machine-readable code.
By 1996, Nick Szabo was using the term "smart contract" to refer to contracts which would be enforced by physical property (such as hardware or software) instead of by law. Szabo described vending machines as an example of this concept. In 1998, the term was used to describe objects in rights management service layer of the system The Stanford Infobus, which was a part of Stanford Digital Library Project.
A smart contract does not typically constitute a valid binding agreement at law. Proposals exist to regulate smart contracts.
Smart contracts are not legal agreements, but instead transactions which are executed automatically by a computer program or a transaction protocol, such as technological means for the automation of payment obligations such as by transferring cryptocurrencies or other tokens. Some scholars have argued that the imperative or declarative nature of programming languages would impact the legal validity of smart contracts.
In some jurisdictions, legal scholars have examined how the rigidity of smart contracts interacts with traditional doctrines such as contractual unforeseeability. For instance, Colombian legal scholarship has proposed adapting the theory of supervening onerousness (teoría de la imprevisión) to account for the high economic and systemic costs of reversing smart contract effects through judicial intervention, emphasizing the need to internalize these costs and develop new procedural mechanisms for digital environments.
Since the 2015 launch of the Ethereum blockchain, the term "smart contract" has been applied to general purpose computation that takes place on a blockchain. The US National Institute of Standards and Technology describes a "smart contract" as a "collection of code and data (sometimes referred to as functions and state) that is deployed using cryptographically signed transactions on the blockchain network". In this interpretation a smart contract is any kind of computer program which uses a blockchain. A smart contract also can be regarded as a secured stored procedure, as its execution and codified effects (like the transfer of tokens between parties) cannot be manipulated without modifying the blockchain itself. In this interpretation, the execution of contracts is controlled and audited by the platform, not by arbitrary server-side programs connecting to the platform.