Sustainable blockchain-enabled services: Smart contracts

Journal of Information Engineering and Applications, 2019

The world today has realized the vast technological evolution that has greatly shaped the production and management functions of business enterprises. Traditional contracts can take weeks or even months to initiate, and there have been numerous instances of breaches and lack of trust for contracts in both the private and public sector. A smart contract can be defined as a self-executing contract that utilizes blockchain technology to digitally enforce, verify, or facilitate the performance or negotiation of a contract. Owing to the security and decentralized system exhibited by blockchain technology, smart contracts can foster transaction credibility between contracting parties without the necessity of third parties as exhibited in traditional contracts. Any business organization that aims at achieving greater heights in management and production dimensions must consider utilizing robust technologies that are aimed at bolstering its competitive edge. Owing to the newness of smart contracts, characterized by very few studies on the same, this research reviews how smart contracts through blockchain technology can be implemented in an organization to enhance performance and outlines the applications, benefits, and limitations associated with such contracts. Keywords: Blockchain technology; smart contracts; smart contract applications; smart contract benefits; smart contract implementation; cryptography; cryptocurrency

ArXiv, 2018

In December 2017, "CryptoKitties", a game on the Ethereum blockchain became an instant success shortly after its launch. It attracted 180,000 users with over $20 million of spend in Ether, and was at one point taking up 12% of all Ethereum transactions. Technically speaking, "CryptoKitties" is a smart contract - a piece of code with storage capability that resides on a blockchain. Smart contracts are gaining increasing popularity in recent years. We present a comprehensive review of smart contracts with a focus on existing applications and challenges they face. We have covered the smart contract mechanisms, promising use cases, as well as relevant research work and the open issues.

International Journal For Multidisciplinary Research , 2023

Emerging technologies play pivotal role to accelerate the application of various developing sectors of the world. Automation and digitalization coupled with blazing fast networking have the potential to automate the execution of civil law. More precisely, smart execution and enforcement of contracts. With this notion in mind, this short article elaborates on the technical attributes of smart contracts and the technology that empowers it, the "Blockchain" and Distributed Ledger Technology or DLT. Moreover, the author of this article strived to emphasize the need for regulatory compliance of this evolving technology with reference to the adoption of smart contracts in various jurisdictions. Finally, the goal of this article is to extrapolate the exigencies of smart contract and how it can revolutionize the traditional contract law with automation and efficiency.

International Journal on Recent and Innovation Trends in Computing and Communication, 2021

Blockchain is a disruptive innovation that is already reshaping corporate, social, and political connections, as well as any other form of value exchange. Again, this isn't simply a shift; it's a fast-moving phenomenon that has already begun. Top financial institutions and a large number of businesses have begun to investigate blockchain in order to cut transaction costs, speed up transaction times, reduce fraud risk, and eliminate the need for middlemen or intermediate services. Blockchain is believed to be the component that completes the Internet puzzle and makes it more open, more accessible, and more reliable. In this article, we first introduced the blockchain technology and smart contracts and their merits and demerits. Second, we present a comparative and comprehensive analysis of smart contract-enabled blockchain applications. Toward the end, we discussed the future development trends of smart contract enabled blockchain applications. This document is intended to se...

2018

This paper provides an analysis of how concepts pertinent to legal contracts can influence certain aspects of their digital implementation through smart contracts, as inspired by recent developments in distributed ledger technology. We discuss how properties of imperative and declarative languages including the underlying architectures to support contract management and lifecycle apply to various aspects of legal contracts. We then address these properties in the context of several blockchain architectures. While imperative languages are commonly used to implement smart contracts, we find that declarative languages provide more natural ways to deal with certain aspects of legal contracts and their automated management.

IRJET, 2022

The rapid growth of blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies has altered the financial industry in recent years, resulting in the creation of a new cryptoeconomy. Then, thanks to the appearance of smart contracts, which are computer protocols designed to facilitate, verify, and enforce automatically the negotiation and agreement among multiple untrustworthy parties, next-generation decentralised applications without involving a trusted third-party have emerged. Despite the positive aspects of smart contracts, security threats, weaknesses, and legal concerns continue to stymie their implementation. We'll look at smart contract architecture and data authentication in blockchain in this chapter. We'll learn about smart contract components and the smart contract's future scope.

An appealing feature of blockchain technology is smart contracts. A smart contract is executable code that runs on top of the blockchain to facilitate, execute and enforce an agreement between untrusted parties without the involvement of a trusted third party. In this paper, we conduct a systematic mapping study to collect all research that is relevant to smart contracts from a technical perspective. The aim of doing so is to identify current research topics and open challenges for future studies in smart contract research. We extract 24 papers from different scientific databases. The results show that about two thirds of the papers focus on identifying and tackling smart contract issues. Four key issues are identified, namely, codifying, security, privacy and performance issues. The rest of the papers focuses on smart contract applications or other smart contract related topics. Research gaps that need to be addressed in future studies are provided.

International Journal of Information Systems and Social Change, 2019

MediaLaws, 2020

The object of the present work is to provide a legal analysis of the formation of legally binding agreements through blockchain-based smart contracts. Smart contracts are computer codes that are capable of running automatically upon the occurrence of specific conditions and according to pre-specified functions. These codes can be stored and processed on a blockchain and any change is recorded in the blockchain. The expression "smart legal contract" refers to the use of smart contracts in the contractual domain to perform already existing contracts or to express legally binding agreements in the form of lines of computer code. Regarding the latter, researchers question whether blockchain-based smart contracts can be considered legally binding contracts. The study aims at putting in correlation contract requirements with blockchain-based smart contracts. The scope of the analysis is to verify how to interpret the rules on contract formation to make blockchain-based smart contracts fit into contract law.

Digital Law Journal

This essay examines whether smart contract innovation is capable of displacing the orthodox adherence to traditional contracts. This examination is underpinned by an analysis of the legality of smart contracts, through which it is exemplified that smart contracts ought to be considered legally binding instruments. The essay proceeds to explore the superiority of smart contracting on a technical and theoretical basis. The advantages generated through smart contract automaticity and enforceability present a concrete basis for undermining reliance on traditional contracts. Blockchain Technology also enhances the benefits of smart contracts by acting as a smart contract enabler through guaranteed performance and enforceability. Nevertheless, such novel technologies inevitably suffer from several shortcomings. This essay considers examples which illustrate the inflexibility of smart contracting. Apart from being susceptible to hacking and code exploitation, smart contracting is unable to...

IEEE Internet Computing

A new legal field is emerging around blockchain platforms and automated transactions. Understanding the relationships between law, legal enforcement, and these technological systems has become critical for scaling blockchain applications. Because 'smart contracts' do not themselves constitute agreements, the first necessary 'legal' development for transacting with these technologies involves linking computational transactions to natural language contracts. Various groups have accordingly begun building libraries of machine readable transaction modules that correspond to natural language contracting elements. In doing so, they are creating the building blocks for ever more complex transactions that will ultimately define the entire envelope of computational legal conduct in these environments, and likely standardise the field. However, also critical to emerging blockchain 'legalities', is the capacity for dispute resolution and legal enforcement. Beyond the performance of parties, or the quality of goods and services transacted, new mechanisms are also needed to address the performance of the computational transaction systems themselves. These are necessary to address the reality that smart contracts cannot be forced to perform actions beyond the parameters of their coding, even by a judicial order. Legal tools, both technological and institutional, are thus being developed to 'soften' the effects of self-executing transactions. In this article we treat these developments as law-making practices that are constitutive of an emerging legal field. Legal engineering exercises of this kind are not novel, and by drawing on historic examples from the common law and international arbitration, we gain insights into the competitive dynamics likely to be shaping legal engagements on the blockchain.

IEEE Access, 2022

A smart contract can be used for automating business processes triggered by specific events caused by IoT sensors, data feeds, or other applications. A blockchain-based smart contract management system is an innovative technology foreseen to automate future business-to-business (B2B) processes. By optimizing business workflow operations, especially in multi-party arrangements, blockchain can play central role in business process re-engineering. In this paper we present a multi-organizational smart contract management system in which a user can create, deploy, and execute smart contracts. This research article consists of two parts; in the first part, we have compared existing smart contract management systems based on different characteristics that can play a vital role in selecting a particular system for a specific business need. In the second part, we have proposed a framework for a blockchain-based smart contract management system. It is a unified architecture that supports both DAO and organizational level blockchain-based smart contract execution. There are two types of separate blockchains used in the proposed framework; SBlockchain and TBlockchain. SBlockchain is used to store smart contracts, whereas all the data generated by the smart contracts stores inside the TBlockchain. In addition, each smart contract has some terms and clauses which are necessary for some event execution. Various components of the framework and their implementation have been described in detail with the help of relevant use-cases. INDEX TERMS Blockchain, DAO, IoT devices, smart contracts, smart contracts management system.

[Preprint] EASE2020, 2020

Corruption is a major global financial problem with billions of dollars rendered lost or unaccountable annually. Corruption through contract fraud is often conducted by withholding and/or altering financial information. When such scandals are investigated by authorities, financial and legal documents are usually altered to conceal the paper trail. Smart contracts have emerged in recent years and appear promising for applications such as legal contracts where transparency is critical and of public interest. Transparency and auditability are inherent because smart contracts execute operations on the blockchain, a distributed public ledger. In this paper, we propose the Minimum Hybrid Contract (MHC), with the aim of introducing 1) auditability, 2) transparency, and 3) immutabil-ity to the contract's financial transactions. The MHC comprises an online smart contract and an o✏ine traditional legal contract. where the two are immutably linked. Secure peer-to-peer financial transactions, transparency, and cost accounting are automated by the smart contract, and legal issues or disputes are carried out by civil courts. The reliance on established legal processes facilitates an appropriate adoption of smart contracts in traditional contracts .

This work begins with an explanation of fundamental concepts about Bitcoin and Blockchain and then explores the main definitions of smart contracts in the updated literature, demonstrates some categories of smart contracts, explores the most widely used platforms that support smart contracts, and gives greater prominence to the Ethereum platform for its more robust characteristics regarding the creation and storage of this type of contract. It then concludes by demonstrating the advantages of smart contracts in relation to traditional contracts, as well as addressing their legal validity.