Future Contracts: Smart Contracts

Abstract

Contract management has always been a classic task for companies; the management of vendors to the remittance handling goes in a cycle, requiring constant monitoring and risk assessment. The vendor-related frauds account for a huge amount of money. It is expected that the fraud detection and prevention market is expected to reach 63.5 billion USD worldwide by 2023, with a CAGR of 26.6%. Hence, companies are looking for a unified solution that can track the phases in a traditional contract lifecycle so the escrow charges can be reduced and centralized monitoring is possible. This paper has presented how a traditional contract life cycle happens, a comparison between traditional contract and smart contract, how a smart contract functions, and its underlying technology. High-level documents like architecture diagrams should be designed in this phase. An architecture diagram depicts business logic in a pictorial format; it also helps developers to follow the correct path during the development. We have also presented the current business challenges in implementing smart contracts and the future scope and further applications.