02 Feb Understanding Potential Behind Smart Contracts

There’s no doubt about the immense potential that lies in smart contracts. They help exchange money, properties, shares, and anything else that has a transparent value by eliminating the middleman entirely and making the entire process transparent, simplified, and secured.

For someone who has never heard of smart contracts before, the best way to describe them is by comparing them to a vending machine. A few years ago, you needed to hire a lawyer or notary to proceed with an agreement in the form of a contract.

However, now you only need to drop a bitcoin into the ledger (i.e., vending machine), and your escrow would be dropped into your account. More importantly, smart contracts define the terms and conditions of an agreement and automatically enforce them upon the parties.

To learn everything there is about these new ways of agreeing on vital areas not only in the business world; we’ve gathered everything you need to know about smart contracts.

What Are Smart Contracts

Like any other contract, a smart contract establishes specific terms of an agreement. What makes it different from a traditional contract is that it’s executed as a code running on the blockchain. With smart contracts, developers can build apps that bring blockchain security, accessibility, and reliability to peer-to-peer functionality.

If you were wondering why most people think about smart contract Bitcoin, it’s because a lot of this new technology relies on this cryptocurrency. To complete a secure, decentralized, and automated transaction, users can send and receive money without the middleman, such as a bank. Besides Bitcoin, it’s important to state that smart contracts run on Ethereum, which provides them with these three benefits: security, accessibility, and reliability.

You can find more details about smart contracts in the article What are Smart Contracts.

What Makes Them Important

There can be a range of decentralized apps and tokens used for different purposes with smart contracts. They can be used in almost anything, from financial tools to game experiences, because they are stored on the blockchain several times more secure than any other alternative method.

Frequently, you will hear about smart-contract-supported apps being called decentralized applications or DApps. These apps are based on decentralized finance tech looking to transform the banking sector. Decentralized finance enables crypto holders to engage in typically quite complex transactions, such as insurance, loans, and savings, without the middle person and their services.

Hyperledger Fabric is an excellent example of smart contract usage combined with the chain code. Such a Hyperledger Fabric smart contract defines the transaction logic that manages the business object lifecycle deployed to a blockchain network.

How Do They Work

It was first introduced to the public in the 1990s by computer scientist Nick Szabo. It was a simplified version of what we know today as a smart contract, but it set the foundation for a technology that will simplify agreements forever. From then on, there was an option to have a valid contract without a human intermediary that can be automatically completed once specific terms of the agreement have been finalized.

Unsurprisingly, Ethereum is the most popular platform for smart contracts, but you can easily find great alternatives, such as EOS, Tezos, Neo, Tron, and Algorand. Another great thing about smart contracts is that they can be created and deployed to a blockchain by anyone.

More importantly, transparency provides additional value as due to their transparent and publicly verifiable code, any interested party can see inside the terms and conditions of a smart contract. Once a smart contract receives funds from one party, the code will be executed by all network nodes to achieve a consensus. Each computer on the node will store the smart contract copy and its updated state with the blockchain and transaction data.

It is why smart contracts can run without the central authority, even if there are unknown entities among the parties looking to complete complex transactions. Keep in mind that to have a smart contract running on the Ethereum network, you will usually have to pay a certain fee that helps the blockchain run.

Final Words

If you’re interested in executing your smart contract for the first time, it’s best to reach out to a smart contracts development company to ensure it is bug-free and not prone to outside attacks.

As much as this is a simplified way for a contract, there is still a lot of technology behind it, and if you’re not an expert, it might be overwhelming for you at first.