Smart contract security

Smart contracts are computer-encoded agreements that automatically put into practice the terms and conditions negotiated between a seller and a purchaser. Or, to put it another way, think of a smart contract as a flow diagram, e.g. if goods are delivered, make a payment - if not delivered, do not pay. A distributed, decentralized blockchain network makes the code and all its agreements available for execution so allows a transaction to take place. Smart contracts can eliminate the requirement for either a manual involvement, a central authority or another enforcement mechanism by facilitating the execution of trustworthy transactions and agreements between unrelated, anonymous participants. Given that English law is used in 80% of international trade documents, the Law Commission for England and Wales has stated : “We have concluded that the current legal framework in England and Wales is clearly able to facilitate and support the use of smart legal contracts, without the need for sta…