MarTech Landscape: What’s a smart contract?

Suppose you had a contractual agreement that understood its own terms, could track whether the terms were fulfilled and could send the required payment or product when the deal was finalized.

That, essentially, is the idea behind a smart contract, one of the new ways of doing business that blockchain technology is introducing. In this article, part of our MarTech Landscape Series, we look at this new kind of self-enacting agreement.

The idea was first proposed in a 1996 paper by computer scientist and legal scholar Nick Szabo:

A smart contract is a set of promises, specified in digital form, including protocols within which the parties perform on these promises.

[Read the full article on MarTech Today.]

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About The Author

Barry Levine covers marketing technology for Third Door Media. Previously, he covered this space as a Senior Writer for VentureBeat, and he has written about these and other tech subjects for such publications as CMSWire and NewsFactor. He founded and led the web site/unit at PBS station Thirteen/WNET; worked as an online Senior Producer/writer for Viacom; created a successful interactive game, PLAY IT BY EAR: The First CD Game; founded and led an independent film showcase, CENTER SCREEN, based at Harvard and M.I.T.; and served over five years as a consultant to the M.I.T. Media Lab. You can find him at LinkedIn, and on Twitter at xBarryLevine.

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