Smart Contract Templates: foundations, design landscape and research directions

TL;DR

This paper explores the foundational concepts, semantic frameworks, and design landscape of smart contract templates, emphasizing legal enforceability, standardization, and future research directions.

Contribution

It introduces a semantic framework for smart contracts, connects legal documents to code, and surveys the evolving design landscape and research challenges.

Findings

Semantic framework for smart contracts proposed

Legal documents linked to standardized code

Identified future research directions

Abstract

In this position paper, we consider some foundational topics regarding smart contracts (such as terminology, automation, enforceability, and semantics) and define a smart contract as an automatable and enforceable agreement. We explore a simple semantic framework for smart contracts, covering both operational and non-operational aspects, and describe templates and agreements for legally-enforceable smart contracts, based on legal documents. Building upon the Ricardian Contract, we identify operational parameters in the legal documents and use these to connect legal agreements to standardised code. We also explore the design landscape, including increasing sophistication of parameters, increasing use of common standardised code, and long-term research.