Smart Contract Templates: Foundations, Design and Research - Smart Contract Templates
by RicardianAugust 7th, 2024
Too Long; Didn't Read
Smart Contract Templates provide a framework to support complex legal agreements for financial instruments. Following Grigg’s Ricardian Contract triple 9, they use parameters to connect legal prose to the corresponding computer code. We observe that the landscape is broad and that there are many potentially viable sets of design decisions.
Authors:
(1) Christopher D. Clack, Centre for Blockchain Technologies, Department of Computer Science, University College London;
(2) Vikram A. Bakshi, Investment Bank CTO Office, Barclays;
(3) Lee Braine, Investment Bank CTO Office, Barclays.
Table of Links
2 Foundations and 2.1 Terminology — “smart contracts”
2.4 The semantics of contracts
3.2 The design landscape for Smart Contract Templates
4 Summary and Further Work and References
3 Smart Contract Templates
Smart Contract Templates provide a framework to support complex legal agreements for financial instruments, based on standardised templates. Following Grigg’s Ricardian Contract triple [9], they use parameters to connect legal prose to the corresponding computer code, with the aim of providing a legally-enforceable foundation for smart legal contracts.
Complex sets of legal documentation can be augmented with the identification of operational parameters that are key to directing the behaviour of the smart contract code (in this paper we call these “code parameters”) — the smart contract code is assumed to be standardised code whose behaviour can be controlled by the input of such parameters.
Here we explore the design landscape for the implementation of Smart Contract Templates. We observe that the landscape is broad and that there are many potentially viable sets of design decisions.
This paper is available on arxiv under CC BY 4.0 DEED license.
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