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.
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.
Abstract 828 The use of digital platforms in the financial sector requires automated processes in order to collect the large volumes of data which will allow firms to create a shared understanding around rules through technological applications. The UK Financial Conduct Authority launched innovation programmes, i. e. a regulatory sandbox, to assess technologies and expedite the delivery of fintech products. This initiative has been followed by the European Digital Finance Package, which introduced the Pilot Regime for market infrastructure based on distributed ledger technology. Albeit a laudable initiative, the EU sandbox model may face obstacles on account of the different approaches taken by Member States in relieving regulatory requirements which can create a perverse incentive to circumvent prudential rules in the context of risk assessment. This article examines the impact of sandboxes on the operation of digital platforms and considers the extent to which decision-making processes are amenable to digital treatment, and what will be the implications for the quality of regulation and the exercise of judgement by the supervisory authority. It argues that the application of regulatory sandboxes can promote more effective compliance processes, while ensuring transparency and accuracy of enforcement actions. 829
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.
Die Digitalisierung des Geldes durch die Einführung des elektronischen Zahlungsverkehrs in diesem Jahrhundert bildet die Grundlage des heutigen unkörperlichen Geldverkehrs. Das Aufkommen neuer rein digitaler Zahlungsarten wie Kryptowährungen setzen diesen Trend der Entmaterialisierung des Geldverkehrs fort. Insofern ist auch das Recht der Zwangsvollstreckung der Frage ausgesetzt, inwieweit die Vollstreckung in solche Werte zur Befriedigung des Gläubigers möglich ist. Dieser Frage geht die vorliegende Dissertation auf Basis des deutschen Vollstreckungsrecht am Beispiel der Kryptowährung Bitcoins nach.
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.
This chapter investigates how those in working in law and technology can and should work together to develop superior legal technologies, particularly in the context of legally binding smart contracts. It looks at contemporary models of interdisciplinary collaboration—including global consortia and strategic partnerships between law firms and technology companies—and considers how existing strategies to build legal technology could be applied to the challenge of developing distributed ledger solutions such as smart legal contracts. Working in tandem, lawyers and developers can build, deploy and scale smart legal contracts more efficiently; leveraging their expertise to break new ground, without diluting their core competencies. This approach will enhance the way lawyers work and democratize access to their services, while improving return on technology investment. By contrast, working in silos, these stakeholders risk misunderstanding part of the problem they are trying to solve. This chapter concludes by considering how lawyers can further stimulate the uptake of smart legal contracts by applying their skill-set to the development and adoption of international standards that are crucial for the sustainable growth and quality management of emerging legal technologies.
Language has always been a critical and fundamental aspect in traditional contract crafting. However, with the advent of smart contracts, where contracts are coded in a programming language and for automated execution, the growth and use of smart contracts may lead towards the homogenization of languages: not just in the form of natural language as programming languages are in the English language, but also in the standardization of the programming language used for smart contracts. This chapter thus aims to discuss how the drafting and use of smart contracts may eventually lead to the homogenization of natural languages and the choice of programming language in contract drafting. It will also raise the issues of such homogenization, such as the potential erosion of non-English or less often used languages, the loss of the monopoly for lawyers as their language expertise becomes less important and how the homogenization of languages can affect technological developments in the use of artificial intelligence in contract drafting.
This chapter presents a number of questions that frame the present volume. It asks how ‘smart’ contracts (broadly defined) might move from technologically feasible aspiration to legal and commercial reality. It suggests that a firm legal (particularly private law) foundation is needed for smart contracts before regulation is considered. Uses for ‘end-to-end’ smart contracts without cryptoassets should be considered, suggesting the importance of encoded contracts outside of distributed ledger systems. A streamlined built-in dispute resolution system would give investors and mainstream markets the confidence needed to allow the use of smart contracts to grow. Lawyers need to make a persuasive case so that they and coders can come together to develop the potential that smart contracts offer to the economies and financial communities of the future.
This chapter explores the evolving landscape of ‘online dispute resolution’. Elaborating on the features of private, blockchain-based dispute resolution mechanisms, customer preference, and the demands of the rule of law, it looks to recent developments in the United Kingdom as one approach to resolving the apparent tension between (state) justice systems and parallel dispute resolution systems that are often transnational by design. These questions about dispute resolution shed light back on the core question in this volume: what is the legal effect of code, in all the circumstances, and how do we describe the dynamics of interaction between the legal system and novel, technology-enabled actions?
This chapter elucidates the position of smart contracts from the perspective of contracts as a means of connecting execution to human intentions, and draws several conclusions with regards to the consequences and limitations of the use of smart contracts. Contracts presume a human execution chain: humans interpret the contractual rules to realize the contract through actions. Interpretation functions as a means of making execution conform to party expectations, with the help of contractual terms in human-readable form, corrected by contract law. Smart contracts offer an alternative, an automated execution chain. This does not remove the need for translating party expectations into a specification of actions (the contract). It does imply that the specification is liberated from the need to be readable by humans. Consequentially, this chapter argues that the smart contract has no expressive force as to its actions: the impression given by the code to a human reader has no intrinsic connection to what the smart contract will do. As a result, smart contracts can execute contracts without exactly following contract law doctrines, although parties probably expect smart contracts to broadly conform to contract law as protecting background expectations. Smart contracts are limited in only following background expectations that have explicitly been programmed: they are unable to follow the precise, case-based and <italic>ex-post</italic> decided way in which equity and fairness operate as correctives. Parties to a smart contract should realize that they lose <italic>ex-post</italic> control such as unfair terms protection.
This chapter argues that promoting and facilitating the use of smart contracts will require us to confront some basic questions concerning definitions, enforceability, and regulation. First of all, is there agreement on what a ‘smart contract’ is? Secondly, assuming that there is a working definition of smart contracts, can traditional contract law adequately govern them? Finally, even if the traditional law can do so, would we require regulation to ensure that their proper use? Ultimately, for smart contracts to become a reality of legal practice, we will require a balanced legal environment that gives a sufficient level of certainty about legal rights under such contracts.
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
Smart Legal Contracts: Computable Law in Theory and Practice is a landmark investigation into one of the most important trends at the interface of law and technology: the effort to harness emerging digital technologies to change the way that parties form and perform contracts. While developments in distributed ledger technology have brought the topic of 'smart contracts' into the mainstream of legal attention, this volume takes a broader approach to ask how computers can be used in the contracting process. \n \nThis book assesses how contractual promises are expressed in software and how code-based artefacts can be incorporated within more conventional legal structures. With incisive contributions from members of the judiciary, legal scholars, practitioners, and computer scientists, this book sets out to frame the borders of an emerging area of law and start a more productive dialogue between the various disciplines involved in the evolution of contracts as software. It provides the first step towards a more disciplined approach to computational contracts that avoids the techno-legal ambiguities of 'smart contracts' and reveals an emerging taxonomy of approaches to encoding contracts in whole or in part. Conceived and written during a time when major legal systems began to engage with the advent of contracts in computable form, and aimed at a fundamental level of enquiry, this collection will provide essential insight into future trends and will provide a point of orientation for future scholarship and innovation.
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.
La presente ponencia pretende abordar los retos jurídicos que, desde una perspectiva del derecho a la prueba, plantean las nuevas formas de contratación inteligente (smart contracts). El desarrollo de las emergentes tecnologías disruptivas, propias de un mercado digital y globalizado, ha originado una nueva problemática en los juzgados y tribunales, relativa al valor probatorio de la cadena de bloques. como sistema que permite almacenar información de forma auténtica. También de los denominados contratos inteligentes, auténticos códigos informáticos que permiten la ejecución automatizada de secuencias previamente programadas. Se abordarán, por tanto, los clásicos problemas surgidos en la teoría general de obligaciones y contratos en relación con los smart contracts, en particular las controversias probatorias relativas a la identidad de los sujetos intervinientes, capacidad y legitimación, derecho aplicable, y tutela en la esfera del derecho de consumo.
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 […]
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.
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
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Jan 1, 2022·Proceedings of the International Conference on Information Economy, Data Modeling and Cloud Computing, ICIDC 2022, 17-19 June 2022, Qingdao, China
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
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.