Invited Paper: Beagle: A New Framework for Smart Contracts Taking Account of Law

Abstract

This paper presents a new Beagle framework for Smart Contracts (SCs) taking account of law. Different from previous SC development or execution frameworks, this framework takes a practical approach to integrate law into SCs. Instead of translating legal contracts into codes directly, this paper proposes to treat SCs as a key component of legal contracts, use SCs to partially automate the executions of legal contracts, and produce legal evidence during the process. Thus, the proposed SC design will be significantly different from previous SC designs, not in programming languages to be used, but in the way SCs are designed and executed. This Beagle framework has five stages: SC template development from domain analysis, formal SC model and code development from templates, verification and validation (V&V), SC execution, and runtime monitoring.