Blockchain Papers

Luís de Lima Pinheiro

International contracts, legal persons and other external organizations raise choice-of-law problems. Should smart contracts and DAOs in general be considered international? Are the choice-of-law rules in force for State courts and for arbitral tribunals appropriate for the determination of the applicable laws? To provide replies to these questions the present essay starts by general introductions to smart contracts and DAOs and also outlines the Private International Law framework of these realities. Solutions for difficulties on the application of the choice-of-law rules in force and more flexible approaches to address them are proposed.

Wenpin Tang

With the increasing adoption of the Proof of Stake (PoS) blockchain, it is timely to study the economy created by such blockchain. In this chapter, we will survey recent progress on the trading and wealth evolution in a cryptocurrency where the new coins are issued according to the PoS protocol. We first consider the wealth evolution in the PoS protocol assuming no trading, and focus on the problem of decentralisation. Next we consider each miner's trading incentive and strategy through the lens of optimal control, where the miner needs to trade off PoS mining and trading. Finally, we study the collective behavior of the miners in a PoS trading environment by a mean field model. We use both stochastic and analytic tools in our study. A list of open problems are also presented.

G. R. De En Goh

Smart contracts provide some benefits, such as better facilitation for contracting parties to monitor performance of their obligation and reducing the cost spent monitoring the contract. However, it is critical to understand various limitations of this concept as well as many legal and public policy uncertainties around it. Given the non-existence of an “universal rule” that governs smart contracts, the issues vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. The article applies comparative legal method to analyse the legal regulation of smart contracts in ASEAN+6 countries as well as the leading jurisdictions in the sphere of implementing digital technologies in the economy. Due to public policy considerations, there are different scenarios of smart contract development. The possible outlook is that ASEAN+6 countries would not accept smart contract as contract, cryptocurrency as property, and/or enforcing foreign awards that relate to smart contract disputes and/or cryptocurrency. Another possible way out of the deadlock is to govern relations under smart contracts by the UNIDROIT Principles. However, if the parties do not opt for such a solution, the determination of the applicable law will be left to the relevant conflict-of-laws rules with all of the uncertainties. Therefore, the author suggests that supranational laws is the better path for avoiding uncertainties in smart-contractual relationships.

Shruti Gatkal, Pornima Borole, Anushka Kawale, Abhijit Mahajan

Blockchain is a peer-to-peer distributed ledger technology that makes the records of any digital asset transparent and immutable and works without involving a third party. Hence, it is independent of a third party and termed as ‘decentralized’. Blockchain is an emerging technology and is gaining a lot of popularity, as it is scalable and also has the ability to manage risks. Blockchain is transforming the way value is exchanged, it has expanded technical capabilities to achieve a higher level of innovation and developer products. Blockchain is the most recent technology that can be adopted for data security. This paper aims to make any legal contracts, such as agreements, and property registries, as well as other assets in India using blockchain for solving issues like avoiding third parties, brokerage services, trusty transactions, etc. It makes it safer as well as non-repudiable. We are proposing a Web3 system that is providing a platform for both parties to make legal contracts using smart contracts and deploy it on blockchain to make safer contracts by inheriting blockchain properties. A smart contract is a digital contract that automatically executes the terms of an agreement by itself. In layman’s terms, it is a computer code that holds the terms of a contract. It stores in decentralized, distributed public blockchain networks that contracting parties can access from anywhere and at any time. With these designs, this digital type of contract runs on blockchain nodes that cannot be changed. This makes the smart contract legal contracting decentralized, free of brokerage services as well paperless that is digital. This solution demands transparency, participation and cooperation society demands. Hence, would help to obstruct corruption and make government services more efficient.

Alan Moreira Lopes, Jurandir Peinado, Fernando Ressetti Pinheiro Marques Vianna, Francis Kanashiro Meneghetti

This article seeks to identify the main factors in adopting smart contracts and the way these factors are known and taken into account by Brazilian companies. Thus, we conducted 30 interviews among Brazilian businesses. Results confirmed the existence of an alignment among the perspectives of the characteristics, benefits and adoption factors for smart contracts. Also, it was possible to conclude that the practice of smart contracts is still incipient in Brazil, and the prospects for applying them in companies have been spurred by the health restrictions put in place by the combat against COVID-19.

Yufei Zhang

The trend in the era of digital globalization has led to innovative attempts in the field of international trade, for example, in the form of smart contracts. Smart contracts aim to digitally automate the execution of legal contracts and improve the ease of trade. However, its formation conditions, validity and risk control, are yet to be regulated by law. The United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CISG), as a uniform substantive law regulating the commercial relations of States in international commercial activities, is valuable in responding to the emerging legal issues arising from the products of technological developments. This study discusses the specific criteria for the formation of smart contracts under the CISG Convention from the perspective of international law and in relation to the specific legal elements. Following this, it analyses the loopholes and challenges of smart contracts in practice from the perspective of contractual freedom and disintermediation, and proposes some improvements in preserving the immutability of the contract and reducing the risk of third party platforms. Finally, the prospects for the application of smart contracts as an aid in international commercial contracts are discussed.

Claire Leveneur

La blockchain est définie comme une technologie de registre distribué utilisant une base de données avec chaînage cryptographique, fonctionnant sans organe de contrôle. Des programmes informatiques auto-exécutants, appelés « smart contracts », peuvent être déployés sur des blockchains afin d’exécuter automatiquement des actions prédéfinies, répondant à des conditions déterminées. Ils s’apparentent ainsi à des mécanismes d’exécution de contrats. La recherche a pour objet de déterminer comment cet outil peut être appréhendé par le droit des contrats et être utilisé au service des contrats. De nombreuses questions se posent dans cette perspective. Les smart contracts peuvent-ils exécuter des contrats ? Sont-ils des contrats ? Sont-ils dotés d’intelligence ? Peut-on les modifier alors qu’ils sont déjà enregistrés sur une blockchain ? Comment prouver qu’une exécution s’est produite sur une blockchain ? Comment trouver l’identité des contractants s’ils sont sous pseudonyme ? Que faire en cas d’erreur de programmation ? L’étude se propose d’aborder l’ensemble des questions qui peuvent survenir lorsque l’on considère les smart contracts comme un outil contractuel. Un travail de qualification de l’instrument permettra de déterminer le régime juridique applicable pour chaque situation donnée.

L. L. Wynn, Susanna Trnka, Jesse Hession Grayman

Anthropologists like to tell stories about how they were wrong. These stories are part of our collective identity. Consider Briggs's (1970) classic ethnography, Never in Anger. Briggs tells a story about doing fieldwork in Nunavut (then the Canadian Northwest Territories) in the early 1960s. She showed anger on behalf of the Inuit group she was living with when they were wronged by a white outsider. To her surprise, her Inuit interlocutors reacted by ostracizing her for months. She describes feeling devastated, lonely, and depressed, but in slowly working her way back to personhood with her Inuit participants, she learned in a powerfully embodied fashion a core principle of their culture: that adults never show anger or make demands, and that to lose one's temper is to demonstrate a dangerous lack of control, even insanity. She documents how this emotional control is inculcated in children from a very young age. Thus her awful moment of social failure is transformed into a profound reflection on affect and socialization in Nunavut culture. The resulting ethnography became one of that era's most famous. Even when our failures and mistakes are less obvious than Briggs's and don't threaten to derail our research projects, many ethnographic writings reflect on moments when the author realized they had brought a bad assumption into the field with them and, as a result, learned something from their research participants—something that shifted their methodological or theoretical approach, or changed what they were studying. These stories are particularly prevalent among graduate students returning from their first fieldwork experiences. The stories go something like this: I went to the field planning to study x, and when I was in the field, I listened to my interlocutors and realized that what I really needed to study was y. For example, in her book Food, Sex and Pollution, Meigs (1984) writes about going to the field intending to study divorce, but when she gets there, everyone seems bored and uninterested when she asks about the topic. Instead, they want to talk to her about sex, gender, and the pollution rules that govern what they can and can't eat. It's such a collective concern that she describes their interest in the topic as a “religion.” Responding to this, she changes her research topic and commits to addressing her research participants’ interests, letting them chart the direction of her work. Briggs tells a similar story: she goes to the Inuit planning to study shamanism, but when she arrives, she finds that the small group she is living with have converted to Christianity and don't want to discuss their “pagan” past. That, combined with her attempts to process the social ostracism caused by her angry outburst, leads her to a whole new project on emotions and socialization. Without having systematically reviewed all the different ways that anthropologists have described their “I was wrong” moments, the AE editors suspect that many, if not most, ethnographies include stories like this, even if most are not as dramatic as Meigs's or Briggs's. These stories are not just about ourselves as individual fieldworkers but about anthropology as a discipline. We tell them to remind ourselves and to teach our students about the discipline's orientation toward a radically inductive and collaborative approach to building knowledge. By telling stories about being wrong, we might seem to be sacrificing our own dignity and authority, but in fact we are shoring up our authority as authentic ethnographers. These stories illustrate our willingness to be humbled by what we don't know, demonstrating our commitment to what Lederman (2007, p. 310) calls anthropology's “systematic openness to contingency.” In short, anthropology is a discipline that has staked its methodological approach on the possibility of mistake and failure. In taking an iterative approach to co-constructing knowledge with our research participants and collaborators, we insist that when we realize we are wrong, we must acknowledge it to move forward. As we were reflecting on this as editors, we thought of our own “I was wrong” stories. For Lisa, it was less a moment and more of a dawning realization. She had been doing research in Egypt on emerging reproductive health technologies, including sildenafil (the generic name for the drug more commonly known as Viagra). As she visited acquaintances and friends in Cairo and Alexandria, she asked them, “Who uses Viagra, and why?” The first time someone mentioned using sildenafil and tramadol (a painkiller) in the same sentence, as if they were synonyms, she dismissed it as ignorance. The man she was interviewing was an illiterate fisherman. He probably didn't use either drug, she assumed, and didn't have the knowledge to realize that they were radically different, having completely different mechanisms of action. Sildenafil produces erections; tramadol, as an opioid narcotic, would be intrinsically erection-wilting, she assumed—and, indeed, recent Egyptian research has demonstrated this (Hashim et al., 2020). The second time someone described using sildenafil and tramadol for the same purpose, she again ignored it. It was not until the third time that an interviewee described the drugs as equivalent that she started to catch on that something significant was afoot. She realized that she had neglected a fundamental point of critical drug studies since at least the 1970s, namely, that a drug's effect is produced not by the drug alone but by the intersection of three elements: the drug and its neuropharmacology; the mindset of the person taking the drug and their expectations about what it will do; and the social context in which they use the drug (Zinberg, 1984). This led Lisa to ask a question that would prove important to her research: Why did people see these drugs as part of a semantic continuum, and what did that say about how Egyptians understand masculinity and its relationship to pharmaceuticals (Wynn, 2022)? In retrospect, I realized that scars were slowly being formed. More precisely, they were being encouraged to form through a communitywide cultivation of silence. Rather than silence being considered an inhibitor of healing, as it is in much of Western medical, psychological, and cultural discourse, this was a case of a community encouraging silence as a means of promoting healing. After several moments when her research participants gently corrected her social blunders, she realized something not just about them and their philosophies of trauma and healing, but about her own deeply held assumption about trauma: that to heal, you need to talk. In contrast, for her research participants, “to break the silence [about past trauma] would be akin to breaking open the wound” (Trnka, 2008, p. 180). Jesse had a key “I was wrong” realization during his PhD research in Aceh, Indonesia (Grayman et al., 2009), where he was studying postconflict humanitarian recovery programs. Jesse was working with an Indonesian medical team that was tasked with providing psychosocial and psychiatric support to civilian survivors of the separatist war (1976–2005). He gave the team a short training on ethnographic methods, with a focus on managing trauma and the ethics of discussing painful conflict memories. Later, during a field exercise, an overeager nurse interviewed a village head about his conflict experience, pressing on despite the man's visible discomfort. As a crowd gathered, the village head recounted horrific torture, evoking tears from an elderly observer. When the conversation ended, the leader quietly remarked, “Sometimes I think there is no need to remember the past like this.” Jesse wondered whether he had misconceived his effort to upskill the medical team with ethnographic methods. Afterward, Jesse reflected on this as a moment of failure, noting that confessional narratives, central to many mental health models, are not always therapeutic. While some participants thanked the team for listening, it was nearly impossible to discern the few who might not benefit from talk therapy. Though Jesse turned the experience into a teachable moment, he regrets that the researcher's moment of learning unfolded in a real community, with real people and real leaders, just barely coming to terms with peacetime after living through decades of political violence. Even today, remembering the event makes Jesse anxious and embarrassed. This draws our attention to another key aspect of the way anthropologists process being wrong. We often experience our mistakes as embodied, visceral moments of regret, embarrassment, frustration, or humiliation. Thus, perhaps recounting our mistakes is not just about asserting our ethnographic achievements and authority, but about helping ourselves process our dark, painful feelings and difficult memories of fieldwork. Wanting to reflect more deeply on these issues, we invited anthropologists to submit to a special forum in which they discuss their moments of being wrong and what these can tell us about our discipline. We asked them to recount events when they realized a flaw in their methodological approach, an interpretive error, an ethical mistake, an event that triggered a theoretical paradigm shift, or a realization that their approach to teaching or doing anthropology needed an overhaul. We asked them to address these questions: When did you realize you were wrong? How did you come to that realization? What did you learn? How did you change the way you do or teach or write anthropology? As we read the submissions to this special forum, we were struck by three recurring themes. The first was embodiment and affect. As described in Jesse's and Susanna's stories of being wrong, and in Briggs's powerful ethnography, it can feel like swimming in dark emotions to realize that you are wrong and to process what it means for how we understand our past and our future in a society. Coming to terms with our mistakes is both an intellectual and an affective process, one that is experienced and felt deep in the body, both as we live the moments of mistake and process them later. A second theme was scale. Being wrong can be a tiny realization leading to a subtle reorientation in focus or approach, a microrecalibration of knowledge or of everyday fieldwork practice, or a grand, dramatic moment that causes a seismic shift in perspective. Of course, it's rarely one or the other. As Kuhn (1962) notes of paradigm shifts, they might seem like revolutions, dramatically overthrowing old modes of thinking, but in reality they take place gradually: anomalies slowly accumulate until the dominant paradigm topples under their weight. The third theme is temporality: “I was wrong” can be a light bulb moment or a slow, unfolding realization, a moment in the field or a decades-later discovery. Some “mistakes” do not reveal themselves until several years or even decades after one's fieldwork, reshaping one's sense of not only their research or the people they spent time with, but of themselves. In My Life as a Spy, Verdery (2018) reflects on how state security services labeled her a CIA agent during her three years conducting ethnography in Romania in the 1970s and 1980s. Their mistaken interpretation of her as a foreign agent began, she suggests, through her own error in judgment—motorbiking alone through the Romanian countryside in search of a field site, she inadvertently strayed into a restricted military zone, missing the sign warning “Entry prohibited to foreigners” (“I had made a stupid mistake. It would not be the last time,” Verdery [2018, p. 3] dryly remarks). the way I carried myself was suspect. At least, so it seemed to my friend Emilia, who told me that when she met me in 1990 she immediately thought I might be a spy: “You were dressed very modestly, you didn't hold yourself above us. Your style was to reduce the difference between yourself and Romanians, under-communicating it.” In short, my manner of dress was a form of hiding. Eventually she came to see it as my way of trying to form good relations with villagers, but her first thought was, “Maybe she's a spy. Instead of seeming like someone from a totally different world, you seemed to be one of us”—that is, she thought I had been specifically trained to fit in. (p. 17) recognize me as a spy because I do some of the things they do—I use code names and write of “informants,” for instance, and both of us collect “socio-political information” of all kinds rather than just focusing on a specific issue. … When I read in the file that I “exploit people for informative purposes,” can I deny that anthropologists often do just that, as Securitate officers do? In 1962 the US Department of Commerce, without authorization or permission from the author, translated from French into English the anthropologist Georges Condominas’ ethnographic account of Montagnard village life in the central highlands of Vietnam. The Green Berets used the document for assassination campaigns targeting village leaders. For years, neither publisher nor author knew this work had been reprinted in English for military ends. How can one accept, without trembling with rage, that this work, in which I wanted to describe in their human plenitude these men who have so much to teach us about life, should be offered to the technicians of death—of their death! … You will understand my indignation when I tell you that I learned about the “pirating” [of my book] only a few years after having the proof that Srae, whose marriage I described in Nous Avons Mangé la Forêt, had been tortured by a sergeant of the Special Forces in the camp of Phii Ko. Condominas's outrage changed how anthropologists think about their writing, their politics, and their ethics of representation. As Price (2007) notes, ethics committees often focus on any immediate risks to research participants, including whether they could be harmed by certain questions (as in Jesse's recounting of interviews about a violent past). Examples like Condominas's, however, show that anthropologists also need to think about the different scales and temporalities of ethnographic work and its possible harms. These themes—embodiment and affect, scale and temporality—come up in fascinating ways in this forum's commentaries. Rejecting the simple binary of right or wrong, Veena Das dismantles the AE editors’ language of “moments” of realization. Instead, she sees anthropological knowledge as a long, dialectical process: the anthropologist slowly finding their way between, on the one hand, the dominant theories and theorists of their time, and on the other, their interlocutors, the “figures of thought” influencing them in the field. She describes a sense of incompleteness or poor fit with existing theories, one that slowly accumulates and eventually compels the anthropologist to see something in a new way, or notice what they haven't been seeing. “By taking a long-term perspective on the vulnerability of knowledge, which reveals itself over time,” Das aims to “draw attention, instead, to the connections between the knowledge of the alien and our own everyday modes of knowing. We miss these connections if we stay with the stark oppositions of truth and falsity, mistakes and correction.” Like Das, Carole McGranahan sees anthropological theory as formed not only in the relationship between fieldworkers and theorists, but also by the theorists in the field. Reflecting on her own training, she writes, “The ethnography often, though not always, came to me pretheorized. People shared stories with me alongside observations, musings, and explanations. Analysis was by no means only the scholar's domain. It belonged to narrator and audience alike.” Gil Hizi thinks through a series of unexpected moments during his PhD research and describes his mistakes as the “naivete of early graduate studies.” In studying practices of among young Hizi learned that after the is no with a but to the that come from interlocutors, in are studying While he at first that they would take no interest in the of an in his Hizi finds the Hizi from these unexpected moments with mistaken come and he through them to his with his realization of his mistakes from to decades He describes feeling early in his during his first with a he he was wrong until interviews when of the difference between the and the [of became account is through with embodied affect. when one to talk with in the of a field at a to being and even more and when he how to his field notes and back to the US without He up with a that … seems of you are wrong, after the when in the field you knew something was but didn't how to with it. writes about finding on an at a in one of which is about the impossible of a The of this with about medical issues, such as the of back into old anthropological about the to and is certain that the only to that the is from the on an from This to the of her and, like Das, her by asserting the of and the of knowledge. writes a account that a different to the of the anthropologist as about being as an and from and working to open up to the makes a that leads her to being Afterward, she her in terms of a intersection of gender, and also with In an dark and that many of us will she that she is not to for being she can't over what she did wrong. She to how it so that she can make in the one be wrong without being at and In her we the of stories about being wrong that don't stories that people don't feel powerful to or that don't to our authority, that are or or the of trauma among who work in of political and violence. In research with in US knew this work might trauma and health was in not other, more and ways to both for individual such as and for the discipline as a which could do more to PhD students and a new of who are ethnography, for as work. forum are a of names and finding their in the field. Their on both recent mistakes and made over not only tell individual but also describe both subtle and dramatic of what ethnographic fieldwork and ethical research the of writing, and and the of old theoretical even as we to think in new reflect of things we have wrong as as the realization of in as Das it. are stories and perhaps the most that all these is their on and to our research and participants’ for to participants’ to who offered after the own The the anthropological in terms of and the willingness to be Thus, an “I was wrong” realization is the of a commitment to It anthropology as a discipline that is and to

Luane Nascimento, David Martins

This study aims to describe how smart contracts are made and the legal certainty of using them on business contracts. For this, the study concepted the smart contract, as well its characteristics and the difference between smart contract and e-contract. Itdescribed the legal certainty of smart contracts and how they can be used on business transactions. Besides, the research explained the importance of blockchain, ethereum and cryptocurrency inthe smart contract. At last, it describeshow smart contracts are applied in the legal universe and demonstrated their advantages as self-execution and clauses’ immutability. For this work, bibliographicresearch and deductive method were used. The study concluded that the inexistence of law causes legal insecurity which represents an obstacle to spread the use of smart contracts.

Olimpia G. Loddo, Andrea Addis, Giuseppe Lorini

An intersemiotic translation is any form of translation that involves at least two different semiotic codes; for example, the translation from words to images, to numerical code, or to non-verbal sounds. One of the most widespread examples of intersemiotic translation in the contemporary world is transposing natural language into machine language in digital environments. In this case, if the source text is a legal text, we encounter a particular type of intersemiotic translation, namely an intersemiotic legal translation in a digital environment. This paper will focus on the intersemiotic legal translation of contracts in digital environments, and is divided into two parts. In the first part (Section Ways of intersemiotically translating a contract using digital tools), we will analyze four possible uses of the intersemiotic translation of contracts in a digital context. In particular, we will highlight the technical characteristics of intersemiotic translation, its limitations, and its potential in different phases of contract management, namely the drafting of the document, the agreement, the archiving of the document, and the execution of contractual clauses. We will examine different digital tools that exploit intersemiotic translation, such as contract drafting tools and online platforms that allow for the conclusion of electronic contracts, document archiving in blockchains, and building smart contracts. When analyzing these uses of intersemiotic translation in the digital environment, we will highlight four types of output that can represent the product of intersemiotic translation in the digital environment: epistemic effects, legal effects, digital effects, and economic effects. In the second part (Section A tool for translating the contract intersemiotically), we will describe a hypothetical prototype that, in light of the four potential uses of intersemiotic translation, could represent a support tool to simplify the communication between professionals and clients through the drafting of legal documents with the aid of dynamic forms and, eventually, with the help of artificial intelligence (AI). Beyond facilitating the dialogue between legal professionals and their clients, we use interfaces to allow clients to create their own drafts of their documents and the lawyer to work on the drafts drawn up by the customer, correct them, and structure them in order to guarantee the validity of the document. The system can also be designed to archive legal documents and private deeds securely and entrust them to a professional by using blockchain technology and automating the execution of some contractual clauses via smart contract protocols.

Giovanni Zaccaroni

The decentralized issuance of financial instruments is presently problematic under EU law. This situation will change with the entry into force of the Regulation on a pilot regime for market infrastructures based on distributed ledger technology. The Regulation provides for a regulatory sandbox - the pilot regime - that market operators can use to test distributed ledger technologies in the financial market industry in a way compatible with EU law. While this will improve legal certainty and increase protection for consumers, it will also introduce a completely new paradigm in financial market legislation: the decentralization of financial instruments. Moreover, the Regulation imposes considerable obligations on market operators, while also granting to the European Securities and Markets Authority and national competent authorities a relevant but difficult role in overseeing and monitoring the pilot regime's development. This Insight aims to provide an overview of the novel features introduced by the Regulation and reflect on whether the legislation will favour or frustrate innovation at EU level.

Frank Emmert

Whenever a new technology emerges and provides new opportunities for business and potentially new and different solutions for real-world problems, developers of the technology, developers of its business applications, and investors supporting the developers, are looking for guidance from regulators. Ideally, the guidance will be more than a snapshot of what is currently allowed but also include reliable information on what will be allowed, and on what conditions, in the foreseeable future. This is more important if development of marketable applications using the new technology is time-consuming and expensive, and if the technology is not just providing incremental improvements to existing solutions and business models but seems to be promising revolutionary changes that may well upend entire industries and make at least some of the existing solutions and business models—and therefore some of the existing businesses—obsolete. Blockchain or distributed ledger technology (DLT) is an example of such a technology since it promises an upgrade to everything we have been doing on the internet. While we have been able to do financial transactions on our smart phones, such as checking our bank balances, making payments via Paypal or Venmo, and ordering stuff on Amazon and Doordash, those were evolutionary or incremental improvements to existing technologies and business models. They largely did not require new and special regulation. The risks presented by those innovations—occasional fraud on the side of misrepresenting “vendors” and occasional fraud by misrepresenting “buyers”—was largely absorbed within the existing systems of customer protection in the credit card market, i.e., by banks and other centralized institutions acting as trusted intermediaries. The emerging applications of Blockchain and DLT will be very different. The technology is creating a trustless environment, i.e., a financial system without the need for trusted intermediaries. In the brave new world of cryptocurrencies, there is no need for commercial banks to facilitate funds transfers, nor for central banks to issue currency and control interest and exchange rates. There also are currently no authorities with clearly defined supervisory powers, no guarantees by institutions or insurers, and not even rules of the road enacted by legislators or courts. Yet, the equivalent of USD 3 trillion are held by millions of individuals in the form of more than 10,000 new digital currencies in more than 200 million cryptocurrency wallets, completely disconnected from traditional bank accounts and credit cards.1 This sum is more astonishing given the fact that every one of those “virtual currencies”2 was privately created and managed, and none of these wallets is protected by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) or any equivalent mechanisms in other countries. Further, other than holding value and transferring value from one wallet to another, there is presently not much that can be done with all the crypto money, since there are not a lot of goods or services that can be bought with crypto, and, more importantly, there are hardly any smart-contract applications3 on the market that could reliably deliver innovative and sophisticated business solutions.4 Last but not least, the entire market is characterized by extreme volatility where a single coin—and to some extent the entire market cap—could jump up or down by 10% or more in a single day.5 Although much of the promise of DLT remains to be demonstrated in practice, and the technology is currently struggling with scaling up,6 what ensures that Blockchain and DLT will not become bubbles that are bound to burst and be forgotten is the sustained investment into actual business solutions via the development of smart applications on a In sustained investment USD in every single the technology its in we may that the investors to more into the development of actual business models and for a what the technology can and and what are with all is is the guidance by the in different The of digital were by a of traditional control and in the world was to of the financial and the just the financial with USD trillion in funds that were money, the existing and, the value of and in the of and currencies are by central banks are are or by and and to and by are by the on of or by mechanisms potentially all those and the currency developers, wallet The of the currency of the of and it to of is one of the of the and the financial is not to up control currencies without a In it did not that a of of were also such as with and not business models with the of by on the by cryptocurrencies, as well as and making financial to and from and This will an of and created for DLT and at the and at the of the in the The provides for a of and to the the in the the have the to on the it not done and it is that will be at the in the foreseeable future. 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Pınar Çağlayan Aksoy

Smart contracts continue to formulate the backbone of blockchain transactions. After the foundation of the Ethereum protocol, the Initial Coin Offerings, Security Token Offerings, and Non-Fungible Tokens have all relied on smart contracts, with enormous market volume. The broad scope of smart contracts’ (potential) application is undisputed, yet many countries have been silent on the regulation of smart contracts. These same countries, however, have already set some standards regarding crypto assets and crypto asset service providers. We can include Switzerland and the European Union, that has already prepared a draft Regulation for Markets in Crypto Assets, in this first group. Some jurisdictions, such as the UK and the US, have already concluded that common law principles suffice to tackle with smart contracts. The third group, including Italy, has defined smart contracts but has no comprehensive regulatory framework. There is a final group of countries that have chosen not to regulate any aspects of the distributed ledger technology (yet). It is without a doubt that the use of smart contracts will cause problems regarding formation, contract performance, applicable law, jurisdiction, protection of consumers, and personal data.

Marisaria Maugeri

Abstract The author makes brief Considerations on the Treatment of the Theme of the Relationship Between New Technologies and Private Law. In particular, she believes that the criticism of Lessig’s statement according to which “the values of real-space sovereigns will at first lose out” is correct, adding, however, that one must monitor the evolution of new technologies. We are, in fact, at the crossroads of a technological revolution which, as jurists, we are not able to fully understand. The author also questions the position taken in the volume on the US neoliberal approach v. European solidarity approach, inviting the authors to question the difference between the narrative that sees the European system as all about ensuring solidarity and the reality about the economic thinking that informs the different disciplines. Finally, she takes a position on the relationship between ordoliberalism and consumer protection.

YE LIU

SpCon: Finding Smart Contract Permission Bugs with Role Mining This page can be best viewed at: https://github.com/Franklinliu/SpCon-Artifact. This artifact has been archived at the following permanent location: [](https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6534218) We wish to apply for the availability, functionality, and reusability badges. Contents This readme first demonstrates how to quickly use <em>SpCon</em> to detect smart contract permission bugs with an example. Then, we provide details on the result reproduction procedures for the two experiments from the paper. Finally, we give an example to show how to reuse <em>SpCon</em> and its API documentation for potential reusability and integration in the future.

Cristina Argelich Comelles

This article analyses the civil and registry implementation of smart property in real estate in Spain from a European perspective. To this end, a general theory is developed for smart property in real estate and transactional smart contracts, paying particular attention to remedies and property acquisition. Based on the remedies suggested by Nick Szabo in his formulation of smart contracts and smart property, such as the smart lien and the property club, other remedies adapted to our Law will be proposed, due to the ineffectiveness of Szabo’s remedies in the Spanish context. In this regard, attention will be paid to the types of acquisition of real rights, the validity and effectiveness of transactional smart contracts, the remedies for breach of contract, and the modifications to registration that these remedies require. Smart real estate requires the tokenization of property and the linking of the digital asset with the real asset. For this purpose, the functions of tokens and the remote control of real estate, the tokenization of real tradition, and the implementation of property technology (PropTech), in particular, the Internet of Things, will be addressed. Finally, blockchainization of the registry will be examined from the perspective of the Land Registry Interconnection and the Interoperability Model for Land Registers (IMOLA) platform in the EU and Alastria Blockchain Ecosystem in Spain, as well as its legal adaptations regarding registry qualification and registry effects in terms of adverse possession.

Dirk Andreas Zetzsche, Jannik Woxholth

Financial technology (Fintech) is disrupting finance at a rapid pace, forcing a rethink on legacy financial regulation. In particular, the question of the regulatory treatment of crypto-assets and blockchain and distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) has been a major focus of regulators and market participants since the launch of Bitcoin in 2009, and further still since the crypto bubble of 2018.1 Yet, a more general question is even more important: How should innovation and the use of only partially understood technology be regulated? In Europe, this was for a long time up in the air. Since the European Commission’s Fintech Action Plan of 2018 signalled a determination to make beneficial use of technical innovation,2 the Commission has taken a broad approach by adopting on 24 September 2020 a new Digital Finance Package.3 That package comprised the new Digital Finance Strategy (DFS 2020)4 combined with a renewed Retail Payments Strategy,5 in an effort to ‘boost Europe’s competitiveness and innovation in the financial sector, paving the way for Europe to become a global standard-setter’.6 The Commission ‘aims to boost responsible innovation in the EU’s financial sector, especially for highly innovative digital start-ups, while mitigating any potential risks related to investor protection, money laundering and cyber-crime’.7

Asim Jusić

Compliance with the GDPR while using blockchain technology for data processing results in compliance issues, due to the fact that the blockchain and the GDPR employ different methods to ensure privacy-by-design and privacy-by-default. The blockchain is built on disintermediation and relative decentralization, whereas the GDPR aims for re-intermediation and relative centralization of the data protection process. This paper provides an overview of and suggestions on how to secure compliance with the GDPR while processing data using the blockchain. A focus is placed on the data protection impact assessment on the blockchain network, issues in identifying and determining the role(s) of sole and joint data controllers and data processors, obstacles to exercising the right to rectification and right to be forgotten when the data is recorded on the blockchain, GDPR data transfer requirements as applied to the blockchain, and the protection of privacy in the process of creating blockchain-based smart contracts.

Karwan Saber, Rebin Ali Mohammed Ameen

The Legality and Effectiveness of Smart Contracts, As Well As Its Impact on Traditional Concepts of Contract Law Karwan Dhahir Saber1 and Rebin Ali Mohammed Ameen2 1Business and Management Department, Faculty of Administrative Sciences and Economics Tishk International University, Erbil, Kurdistan Region, Iraq 2Director-General of Administrative and Financial Affairs, Ministry of Natural Resources, Erbil, Iraq […]

Dominik Groß

Zusammenfassung Smart Contracts als algorithmen-basierte Routinen eignen sich zur automatisierten Vertragsabwicklung. Hierzu ist es notwendig, dass sich die Vertragsgestaltung der besonderen Anforderungen bewusst wird, die ein Programmcode, der lediglich einfache Wenn-dann-Beziehungen abbilden kann, an sie stellt. Ein automatisches Ablaufen eines Smart Contracts kann nur dann zur Vertragserfüllung eingesetzt werden, wenn die komplexen juristischen Vereinbarungen zwischen den Parteien derart dekonstruiert werden, dass seine automatische Ausführung möglich ist. Für den Bauvertrag wurde die Zahlungsabwicklung als ein Komplex identifiziert, der es mittels Bautenstandsfeststellungen mithilfe der Methode BIM erlaubt, eine (teil-)automatisierte Vertragsabwicklung durchzuführen. Der Beitrag möchte das Bewusstsein für das Potenzial einer solchen Teilautomatisierung, aber auch für deren Grenzen schärfen. Die Vertragsgestaltung muss ermitteln, an welchen Stellen trotz Teilautomatisierung menschlicher Input notwendig bleibt. Darüber hinaus gilt es die zwingenden Regelungen des Datenschutzes zu beachten. Im Rahmen eines Ausblicks wird untersucht, inwiefern sich die für den Bauvertrag gefundenen Ergebnisse auf die Abwicklung anderer Vertragstypen übertragen lassen.

Thales Gonçalves Primo

As transações financeiras que acontecem na Internet se garantem a partir do mesmo tipo de garantia utilizado por sistemas financeiros tradicionais. Assim, em cada transação se tem o regulamento sendo realizado por órgãos que fazem parte do sistema ou instituições financeiras. Porém, o número de transações e seu dimensionamento tem prejuízo por conta dos considerados terceiros de confiança, não conseguindo abandonar a mediação entre disputas e partes com interesse. Dessa maneira o objetivo do presente estudo é o de elucidar os desafios pertinentes a aplicação dos smart contracts. A metodologia corresponde à técnica de pesquisa utilizada em trabalhos acadêmicos. Em suma, a conclusão é que os smart contracts não são viáveis nos termos e infraestrutura técnica existentes, e se houver um contrato, haverá penalidades por violar a autonomia privada e a incapacidade de exercer direitos previstos em lei

Silvia Badiola Coca

Acceso cerrado a este documento. No se encuentra disponible para la consulta pública. Depositado en Academica-e para cumplir con los requisitos de evaluación y acreditación académica del autor/a (sexenios, acreditaciones, etc.).

Nianfeng Li, Tingting Zhang, Lina Li, Dezheng Jin · 5 authors

As an emerging technology, smart contract has attracted more and more attention. In order to deeply analyze the research status and development trend in the field of smart contract at home and abroad, we take the core journals of CNKI and ScienceNet database in recent ten years as the research objec

Patrick C. Leyens, Stefan Heiss, Lukas Soritz

Smart Contracts bieten erhebliche Chancen für den auf Einfachheit, Schnelligkeit und Rechtssicherheit angewiesenen Rechtsverkehr zwischen Unternehmern (B2B). Die erhöhte Eigenverantwortlichkeit der Beteiligten rückt die Privatautonomie in den Vordergrund, lässt größeren Freiraum für selbstdurchsetzende Gestaltungen und spricht dafür, den infolge der Digitalisierung verbesserten Möglichkeiten der Informationsauswertung durch eine zurückhaltende AGB-Kontrolle Rechnung zu tragen. Vor diesem Hintergrund können sich Smart Contracts des unternehmerischen Rechtsverkehrs als Motor eines selbstgeschaffenen Rechts der digitalisierten Wirtschaft erweisen.