By
Godfrey Benjamin
December 28th, 2023
The white paper focuses on twelve smart contract use cases across a range of industries and topics.
The Chamber of Digital Commerce published “Smart Contracts: 12 Use Cases for Business & Beyond” at its Smart Contracts Symposium that took place at the Microsoft Technology Center in Times Square, New York, the other day. The participators – more than 250 of the world’s leading financial institutions, legal experts and blockchain technologists – gathered together to discuss the widespread adoption of the blockchain and were the first lucky ones to get access to the paper.
Smart contracts serve as a digital, self-executing way of transferring assets or conducting actions based on the blockchain technology. Smart contracts pioneer Nick Szabo starts the white paper by saying that “blockchain technology appears very much to be the jet fuel necessary for smart contracts to become commonplace in business transactions and beyond. It is a delight to be part of a community committed to fostering the tenants of open source cooperation, privacy and security, education in technology, and working for a common social good.”
The white paper focuses on twelve smart contract use cases across a range of industries and topics:
- Digital Identity
- Records
- Securities
- Trade Finance
- Derivatives
- Financial Data Recording
- Mortgages
- Land Title Recording
- Supply Chain
- Auto Insurance
- Clinical Trials
- Cancer Research
Besides, the paper covers legal and regulatory considerations connected with the implementation of smart contracts.
“Smart contracts will bring clarity, efficiency and predictability to the way we conduct business,” said Jason Brett, Director of Operations at the Chamber of Digital Commerce, at the Smart Contracts Symposium. “On behalf of the Smart Contracts Alliance, I am pleased to present this paper to the business and policy communities, and would like to thank all of our members and contributors for their collaborative and valuable contributions to this white paper.”
The Smart Contracts Alliance, a working group of the Chamber of Digital Commerce, has partnered with Deloitte, the world’s largest professional services company that is leading blockchain innovation, to develop the white paper. The paper is available for download here.
Bloomberg confirms that it is possible to lower transaction costs by automating the performance of smart contract terms. It allows creating rules without worrying about how to enforce them. And if the software resides on multiple interconnected computers spread all over the world – that is, on a blockchain – nobody can tamper with it or shut it down.
Vitalik Buterin, a co-founder of Ethereum, once described a smart contract that would manage a renter’s relationship with a landlord: “If he shuts off his account paying the local government $6.60 land value tax per day, then he loses ownership and the contract automatically switches over so you are renting from the government instead.”
