In real estate, blockchain can help a lot in both the title business and in pretty much every aspect of it,” Hedvat said.

Other industries are already experimenting with the encrypted ledger technology. IBM, for example, is using it to monitor its food distribution network and recently released a blockchain-based app for cross-border payments. Similarly, the San Francisco-based startup Propy, an online real estate marketplace, uses blockchain to simplify cross-border transactions. Propy, which launched this year, has already brokered one such real estate deal entirely online. TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington, who is also an investor in Propy, bought an apartment in Kiev, Ukraine, for $60,000 through the platform in September.

“We’re at a great point now,” said Ragnar Lifthrasir, founder of the International Blockchain Real Estate Association (IBREA), which hosted a second annual conference in Manhattan in October. “We’re finally getting strong interest from both sides — software engineers and the big real estate companies.

Similar to Ethereum, BitBay is a cryptocurrency with smart contract technology. It also provides a decentralized marketplace which lets anyone in the world sell anything and everything with relative ease and full anonymity. This project has been around for quite some time now, yet it seems to fly under most people’s radars. The creation of smart contracts occurs through BitBay’s user interface, which makes it somewhat easy to set things up. It’s very similar to how most people create Ethereum contracts these days.

Although it only takes a few clicks to create said contracts – there is no coding involved – it’s not necessarily trustless by default. More specifically, the trustless aspect comes in the form of the decentralized marketplace where these smart contracts are visible. Both buyer and seller must deposit a fixed amount of money into an encrypted account. Anyone trying to cheat will cause both deposits to be destroyed. It is a double-deposit escrow system, which is pretty nifty in its own regard.

“A blockchain-based framework designed to serve the needs of AI agents as they interact with each other and with external customers can enable the emergence of a collective intelligence,” notes the draft white paper. “The use of cryptocurrency and blockchain for AI services provides a number of advantages. It allows AI agents to exchange work and subcontract with a high degree of flexibility, and also enables AI-based microservices to be offered to any customer via easily accessible APIs (enabled by smart contracts under the hood).”

Goertzel, Hanson and the SingularityNET team want to balance long-term visionary thinking with practical market needs and business concerns. In their view, the platform could enable AIs to learn from each other and collaborate, which would be one of the biggest breakthroughs ever in the evolution of AI, causing a subsequent impact on the global AI market, which is projected to grow from $233.8 billion in 2017 to $3.1 trillion in 2025.

“From day one, SingularityNET will offer AI agents,” continues the white paper. “The open design of the network, and the economic incentives, should then encourage additional AI developers to add their own AI nodes via the SingularityNET API.”

While many nodes will run on powerful supercomputers in the cloud, others will be embedded in Internet of Things (IoT) devices, and humanoid robots like Sophia will be supplied with on-board SingularityNET nodes. The upcoming SingularityNET token, details of which haven’t been disclosed yet, will play a central role in the network’s operations.

The project is about to launch an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) to fund the full development of its platform, to be fully deployed in 2018. “This ICO will allow us to start with a bang,” said Goertzel. “We'll be competing with Google and Facebook...so having a war chest would allow us to take on them more easily.”

Enter the smart contact. A self-executing digital agreement that is pre-programmed, enforceable using data, and accessed through the blockchain. This groundbreaking technology allows two parties to trade and do business with each other, with no third party to verify or uphold the terms of the deal.

Etherparty launched the platform with over 500 pre-registered users and currently has smart contact templates available for beta testers. The platform is clean and easy to use, especially by those who don’t have programming experience or knowledge.

Blockchain oracles sound like something from ancient Greek mythology, and in a way, they function in a similar role. In ancient stories, people didn’t have enough information to make decisions and turned to oracles for information beyond their understanding.

In the same way, Blockchains like those of Bitcoin and Ethereum, do not have ready access to information outside of the chain, and so there is no direct way to validate the conditions that smart contracts are based on. An oracle is, simply put, a translator for information provided by an outside platform.

Oracles provide the necessary data to trigger smart contracts to execute when the original terms of the contract are met. These conditions could be anything associated with the smart contract - temperature, payment completion, price changes, etc. These oracles are the only way for smart contracts to interact with data outside of the Blockchain environment.

Blockchain technology is no longer just for startups.

Now even the big businesses are getting on board.

In the latest example, Oracle announced Monday it will release a new platform next year that's designed to help businesses use blockchain technology for supply chain management and smart contracts. 

"Blockchain holds the promise to fundamentally transform how business is done, making business-to-business interactions more secure, transparent, and efficient," said Amit Zavery, senior vice president of Oracle Cloud Platform, in a press release. 

Oracle's platform, which is currently in beta testing, is designed to provide "pre-assembled" tools for enterprises to use for anything that requires contracts, transactions, or tracking. 

The platform is built on top of Hyperledger Fabric, an open-source blockchain endorsed by other enterprise competitors including IBM, Cisco, SAP, and Intel. Oracle joined the Hyperledger Project, which is part of the Linux Foundation, as a supporting member in August. 

The top judge for England and Wales believes that U.K. law may need to be updated to account for blockchain-based smart contracts.

John Thomas, Baron Thomas of Cwmgiedd, serves as the Lord Chief Justice for England and Wales, and is effectively the most senior judge in whole of the U.K.

Late last month, in previously unreported comments, Thomas gave remarks during a lecture event held bi-annually by the U.K. Law Commission, an independent body that monitors legal developments in the country and recommend reform actions to the government.

What he said: Thomas' speech focused on legal reform in light of 21st century developments, advocating for actions to keep British law up to date with the digital economy.

During his remarks, Thomas commented on efforts by the European Commission – the executive arm of the European Union – to harmonize its rules with an increasingly digitized economy. He pointed to the bloc's work on digital currencies and blockchain, going on to suggest that the U.K. should pursue a similar agenda.

He told event attendees:

"Certainly, the European Commission takes the view that legislative change will be needed to deal with new forms of contract such as the blockchain and smart contracts. I have no doubt that we must consider whether our law (as it will then be) will need similar legislative updating."

Why it matters: The past year has seen a number of instances in which smart contracts and blockchain-based signatures are given a degree of legal representation, seen more recently in U.S. states like Arizona and Vermont.

Most recently, the state of Delaware cleared legislation that recognizes business records that are tied to a distributed ledger system.

In his speech, Thomas notably questioned whether such a process should be left to judicial consideration – "developing the law in the traditional manner" – in the context of the digital age.

This technology has lots of potential uses beyond banking. It’s now possible to use the blockchain as a database that keeps all kinds of records in a secure and easily accessible place without laborious, paper-heavy processes. For example, IBM is helping Maersk, a Danish shipping company, use the technology to cut down on the number of people required to track millions of shipping containers around the world. According to the shipping giant, a container making its way from East Africa to Europe could require stamps and approvals from as many as 30 people, and it could go through more than 200 interactions by the time it reaches its destination. By using blockchain, Maersk could get rid of the paperwork and speed up the process, saving the company millions of dollars.

“If you think about the amount of effort and time record-keeping takes up, it’s actually a huge deal for businesses,” says Karim Lakhani, a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. “That’s why there is so much hype around it.”

Meanwhile, more than 90 banks worldwide, including HSBC and Deutsche Bank, are exploring the potential of blockchain. Santander InnoVentures, a venture capital fund, estimates that this new technology could save banks up to $20 billion a year by 2022, by making transactions and bookkeeping faster and more streamlined. “Many jobs, especially in finance, are repetitive and not very stimulating, and blockchain will help us create systems that are automated,” says Feldmeier, the Zug-based cryptocurrency entrepreneur.