Get the weekly summary of crypto market analysis, news, and forecasts! This Week’s Summary The crypto market ends the week at a total market capitalization of $2,17 trillion. Bitcoin continues to trade at around $62,300. Ethereum experiences no changes and stagnates at around $2,400. XRP is down by 2%, Solana by 1%, and Dogecoin by 3%. Almost all altcoins are trading in the red, with very few exceptions. The DeFi sector decreased the total value of protocols (TVL) to around…
Smart Contracts: Behind the Scenes!

One of the “killer applications” of blockchain technology is smart contracts. Smart contracts are regular contracts that enforce according to the agreed terms and conditions are written in the code. This is a “killer app” because it removes the middleman for services, just as Bitcoin eliminates the middleman for asset transfers. With smart contracts, intermediary services such as brokers and agents are made redundant instead of becoming a more expensive opportunity cost to using smart contracts. On the customer-facing side, there will be little change in how transactions are conducted. However, behind the scenes, the intricacies are more complex.
What is a Contract?
Let us first take a step back and understand what a contract is and how it is formed. Contracts need certain vital elements that allow them to be enforceable in the courts. There must be an offer and an acceptance in the most straightforward contracts, including an agreement from both parties that the contract will have legal force. The agreement in question is legal (among other considerations). This is the traditional view of contracts.
However, it is essential to note that the advent of the internet pushed this definition to its limits with clickwrap contracts (in which a user must agree to the contract). The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is an ode to this fact – that contract law needed to be updated for the internet age because large companies were taking advantage of the loopholes and fine print. In the case of clickwrap, the internet allows people to sign up for hundreds of services a day, and people are expected to read all the terms and conditions for each service. But this is infeasible, as Time magazine calculated that it would take 76 days every year to read all of one’s privacy policies. As a result, users face a zero-sum choice: to accept the clickwrap contract or not use the service.
Enter: Smart Contracts
Enter smart contracts, paving the middle way. Nick Szabo, their creator, defines smart contracts as a set of promises specified in digital form, including protocols within which the parties perform on these promises. The above example allows the user to negotiate with the company and decide what a fair agreement would be for both parties (e.g., the user only enables the company to monetize specific data and activity and MUST share a percentage of this revenue). As long as the preconditions are coded into the smart contract, it is possible to have a contract that negotiates with the user at the point of sale.
Smart contract processing can be broken down into six key steps:
- Identify the agreement between the parties;
- Set the conditions of the agreement;
- Code the business logic into software;
- Encrypt the agreement for immutability;
- Run the smart contract for compliance and verification;
- Update other nodes of the new contract.
It is a lengthy process, but its aspects will be automated as the cryptocurrency space develops. This is one of the current challenges of smart contracts: complexity. Smart contract development is currently only reserved for programmers, not laypeople entrepreneurs. Furthermore, security is a crucial challenge to overcome, especially on a large scale with millions of dollars running through the code, not to mention questions about privacy, data ownership, and jurisdictional governance brought into question by smart contracts.
Smart contracts are set to transform the operations landscape across industries, lowering the cost of transactions while improving speed and security. But there are still many discussions and details regarding the regulatory side of smart-contract implementation.
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