The emergence of blockchain-based smart contracts represents a paradigm shift in contractual relationships, offering automated, tamper-proof and self-executing agreements that promise to reduce transaction costs and enhance efficiency. Yet, their legal enforceability under traditional contract law frameworks continues to raise complex questions regarding formation, validity, performance and dispute resolution. This research article conducts a comparative doctrinal analysis of the contract law regimes in Pakistan, the United Kingdom and Singapore to assess the extent to which blockchain smart contracts are recognised, validated and judicially enforceable. The study examines key statutes (Pakistan’s Electronic Transactions Ordinance 2002, the UK’s Electronic Communications Act 2000 and common-law principles and Singapore’s Electronic Transactions Act with its blockchain-friendly amendments), judicial precedents, regulatory policies and ongoing legislative developments. Findings reveal that Singapore has established the most progressive and enabling environment, the UK provides flexible common-law recognition with incremental clarifications, while Pakistan’s framework offers only rudimentary electronic-contract validity and lacks specific provisions for decentralised automation and immutability. The paper identifies legislative gaps, highlights best-practice lessons and proposes targeted reforms for Pakistan to align with international standards. Ultimately, this comparative examination underscores the urgent need for legal harmonisation to unlock the full potential of blockchain technology in cross-border commerce while safeguarding consumer protection and judicial oversight.
This article proposes the creation of a new Luxembourg company form, the Société Anonyme Tokenisée (SAT), which would natively use distributed ledger technology (DLT) for all shares and governance functions. The SAT would be a fully compliant legal entity under EU law, issue tokenised securities recognised as financial instruments, and enable smart contract-based governance. The proposal is based on Luxembourg’s progressive blockchain legislation and the need for corporate law to keep pace with technological innovation.
With the advancement of various technologies, the latest generation of contracts called smart contracts has emerged. The language of these contracts is computer code, and since they are concluded on the blockchain, their contractual provisions are self-executing and irreversible. In these contracts, as in traditional contracts, there is a possibility that due to reasons such as defects, ambiguity, brevity or silence in the provisions of the contract or the inconsistency of the effects of the contract with the intention of the parties, the contract may need interpretation to resolve the disputes that have arisen. Smart contracts can be interpreted based on the way they are concluded with two approaches: textualism or contextualism. To interpret the “wet smart contract” with textualism approach, first, the pre-contract concluded in human language must be referred to within its framework, and not beyond, and it must be examined in accordance with the general rules of contract interpretation, and then the conformity or inconsistency of the effects of the smart contract codes with the intention of the parties should be analyzed. If "smart contract is dry," the contract codes can only be translated with the help of blockchain programmers and interpreted by an interpreter. By examining these codes and analyzing the specified instructions, it can be determined what instructions the parties intended to give to the computer, and the reason for the discrepancy between the effect of the contract and the intention of the parties can be identified and the resulting disputes can be resolved.
본 연구는 스마트계약에 전통적인 계약에 적용되는 현행법을 적용할 수 있는지 계약성립에 관한 쟁점을 중심으로 고찰하였다. Quoine Pte Ltd v B2C2 Ltd 사건에서 컴퓨터 프로그램에 의해 자동으로 암호화폐를 거래하는 것은 인간의 개입이 없더라도 법적 구속력이 있는 계약으로 판단하였으므로 스마트계약에서 발생하는 분쟁에도 현행법을 적용할 수 있음을 시사한다. 영국법과 민법상 스마트계약은 코드를 공개하는 청약과 조건의 성취를 위한 행위에 의한 승낙으로 성립됨을 인정한다고 볼 수 있다. 코드의 설계와 이행에 대한 착오는 영국법상 공통착오와 일방착오로 구분하여 계약의 무효 여부를 판단하고, 민법에서는 표시착오, 내용착오, 동기의 착오로 구분하여 착오로 인한 취소 여부를 판단해 볼 수 있다.
The integration of smart contracts, blockchain, and AI is revolutionizing insurance by boosting efficiency, transparency, and automation, but also introduces legal and regulatory challenges under English common law and the EU AI Act. This chapter explores how smart contracts can be effectively adopted in insurance while addressing trust, transparency, and compliance, focusing on their legal enforceability, use in parametric and marine insurance, and the EU AI Act's stringent demands for fairness, accountability, and transparency in AI-driven processes. It contrasts the UK's flexible, principles-based approach—rooted in good faith and fairness—with the EU's rigid, risk-based framework, assessing their impact on innovation, consumer protection, and cross-border operations. By analyzing algorithmic bias, explainability, liability, and fraud detection, the study provides a holistic legal and regulatory analysis and proposes a balanced framework to harmonize innovation with legal compliance, ensuring a fair, transparent, and resilient insurance market in the digital age.
The notion of decentralization has acquired a central position in contemporary debates on crypto-asset regulation, yet its legal meaning remains largely unresolved. MiCA is the first EU legislative act to attach explicit regulatory consequences to decentralization, most notably through Recital 22, which excludes from its scope services ‘provided in a fully decentralized manner without any intermediary’. This chapter examines how such decentralization could be interpreted and demonstrated when invoked as a criterion of regulatory scope. Adopting a legal-dogmatic and functional approach, it argues that the ‘proof of decentralization’ should be grounded in verifiable distributions of control, discretion and operational capacity. The chapter develops this argument across three analytically distinct layers of the cryptoasset ecosystem: node operators at the network layer, smart contract deployers at the protocol layer and front-end providers at the interface layer. It shows that each layer hosts actors capable of influencing transactional outcomes in ways that may reproduce, rather than eliminate, forms of financial intermediation and risks targeted by MiCA. The analysis illustrates why decentralization is a matter of degree rather than an absolute condition and why its evidentiary assessment must be structurally informed. The chapter concludes by outlining the implications of this approach for MiCA’s supervisory landscape and for the future treatment of decentralized systems within EU financial regulation. Keywords: decentralization, MiCA, crypto-asset services, regulatory scope, decentralized finance, DeFi, blockchain governance, node operators, protocol deployers, front-end providers, distributed ledger technology, intermediation, EU financial regulation.
This thesis explores the doctrinal and practical challenges of applying the principle of party autonomy (lex voluntatis) to smart contracts and transactions governed by Artificial Intelligence (AI). The decentralized and immutable nature of Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) fundamentally disrupts traditional private international law connecting factors, such as "place of performance" or "habitual residence." The author analyzes how the Rome I Regulation and the Hague Principles on Choice of Law can be adapted to "code-is-law" ecosystems where enforcement is automated and often bypasses state judicial mechanisms. Special attention is paid to the tension between algorithmic execution and "overriding mandatory provisions" (lois de police), questioning whether an AI can recognize and apply mandatory public policy norms that usually override the chosen law. The paper proposes a hybrid regulatory approach "Lex Cryptographia" that embeds choice of law clauses directly into the smart contract's metadata to ensure legal certainty.
Pothavarjula Phani Prasad, G. Srishailam, T. Srikanth, B. Ranjith Kumar
The primary requirement of any networking application is to maintain a high level of security. In this context, blockchain ecosystems have been rapidly evolving to address such challenges, leading to a growing demand for the development and implementation of Decentralized Applications (DApps). In recent years, several tools and platforms have emerged to support the deployment of various cybersecurity applications using blockchain technology. However, selecting the most suitable blockchain framework for a specific application has become a critical challenge. In this regard, we present this paper to perform a comparative study of smart contract deployment on Ethereum, Polygon, and Fantom blockchains. It includes architecture overviews, performance analysis, and step-by-step deployment methodology using Hardhat and MetaMask. The results help identify trade-offs in scalability, fees, and ease of development across these leading EVM-compatible platforms.
David López Jiménez, Eduardo Carlos Dittmar, Jenny Patricia Vargas Portillo
Stablecoins have emerged as a transformative yet controversial development in digital finance, promising stability while posing novel regulatory and systemic risks. Their growing role in payments, decentralized finance, and remittances raises questions about monetary sovereignty, consumer protection, and financial integrity. This chapter examines the governance of stablecoins through comparative and interdisciplinary perspectives, focusing on the evolving relationship between self-regulation, soft law, and hard law. Special attention is given to the Commonwealth Model Law on Stablecoins (2025), which provides a harmonised legislative framework designed to balance innovation with financial stability and inclusion. By comparing this model law with international approaches such as the EU's Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA) and voluntary standards from global standard-setting bodies, the chapter highlights how model laws can bridge the gap between flexibility and enforceability in the governance of digital money.
This article examines the probative value of blockchain (distributed ledger technology) in legal proof. It highlights the technology’s core features—decentralization, immutability, cryptography, and time-stamping—and assesses how they fit within rules of evidence, particularly the requirements of electronic writing and electronic signature. The study also discusses the extent of legislative recognition in Morocco and comparative systems, with a focus on identity attribution and the link between a digital record and its author. It concludes that blockchain records may carry increasing persuasive force, while full evidentiary equivalence requires clearer regulatory frameworks and trusted digital services to ensure integrity and reliability.
The article examines the regulatory challenges associated with smart contracts in the Russian legal framework and explores the potential role of UNCITRAL instruments in addressing them. The main problem lies in the absence of a clear legal qualification of smart contracts in Russian law. Although smart contracts are used in practice and are indirectly reflected in certain provisions of the Civil Code, Russian legislation does not define them as automatically formed or automatically performed contracts. As a result, their regulation is largely shaped by the internal rules of digital platforms. The article argues that a smart contract should not be reduced either to a traditional contract, an electronic form of contract, or merely a method of performance. Rather, it should be treated as a sui generis legal and technological phenomenon. Particular attention is paid to the principles of technological neutrality, non-discrimination of automated transactions, attribution of actions performed by automated systems, and unexpected outcomes. The UNCITRAL Model Law on Automated Contracting may serve as an important reference point for developing a balanced Russian approach that combines statutory principles with platform-based regulation.
When a smart contract executes exactly as programmed, it can still fail to do what the parties actually agreed to. This paper examines a structural gap between legal contracts, written in ordinary language that tolerates ambiguity by design, and executable code, which cannot process ambiguity at all. Drawing on Accord Project's own teaching documentation, the paper shows that even the most influential open-source framework for smart legal contracts treats deliberately open legal standards, such as "in the receiver's opinion" or "force majeure," as simple binary variables, embedding legal indeterminacy into code without resolving it. This gap acquires particular urgency in South Korea, where a February 2027 deadline requires tokenized securities platforms to register under a new distributed ledger framework, amid technological fragmentation across at least five competing architectures and a "digital native" model in which the ledger itself, without a parallel central registry, becomes the sole legal record. The paper argues that closing this gap does not require new technology, but a governance requirement modeled on a well-established regulatory pattern found in civil aviation and other fields: certifying verifiable outcomes without prescribing the specific technique used to achieve them. It concludes with a concrete recommendation for Korea's forthcoming distributed ledger standard requirements guideline.
The incessant development and ubiquitous diffusion of information and communication technologies give rise to phenomena of considerable socio-economic and therefore legal significance. Among these, contractual relationships are strongly affected by technological evolution, which provides new tools for negotiating, concluding and executing contracts, with specific operating dynamics and unpublished legal issues. In this perspective, from a legal point of view, the contract-technology combination represents a topical issue for a comparative analysis, which provides the interpreter with an overall view of different local responses to common developments and problems deriving from the use of technology in contracts.
This essay examines the challenges that smart contracts pose for contractual interpretation. While smart contracts are often viewed as unambiguous because they operate through deterministic computer code, disputes may nevertheless arise where the outcome produced by the code diverges from the parties’ understanding of their agreement. The essay argues that these disputes are not adequately addressed by treating code as a definitive expression of contractual intention or by adopting the ‘reasonable coder’ standard proposed by the United Kingdom (‘UK’) Law Commission. The reasonable coder standard is theoretically incoherent because it lacks alignment, generality, and reviewability and therefore cannot perform the descriptive and normative functions served by the reasonable person standard. Thus, this standard should be discarded entirely. Interpretation should continue to be governed by the reasonable person standard, while relaxing the evidentiary constraints imposed by the parol evidence rule. By permitting greater reliance on contextual materials, including pre-contractual negotiations and subsequent conduct, courts can more accurately identify the bargain the parties intended to conclude without having to invoke a conceptually unstable standard.