#smartcontractpolicy

the term “smart contract” back in 1994, but DocuSign can make a compelling case for being its true inventor. Since its founding in 2003, firms of all sizes and industries have relied on the company to streamline the contract process through its best-in class security, identity authentication, user interface, and integration with leading business suites. Today DocuSign has 500 thousand paying customers, and it earned over $700 million in revenue last year.

However, the company is not resting on its laurels and instead is seeking ways to improve its service offerings, with much of this experimentation incorporating blockchain technology. Over the last few years this testing has included trials, demos, and partnerships on both Bitcoin and Ethereum. The company also joined the Accord Project, an open-source software initiative that was established to develop a technology stack for smart agreements. Furthermore, last week the company invested in a $5.5 million Series A round for smart contract provider Clause alongside Galaxy Digital with the goal of making contracts on their DocuSign Agreement Cloud “self-executing” and “self-aware” in an ongoing fashion, rather than just one moment in time.

For traditional coding, it is a prevalent practice to segregate the code into various sections, which is also true in designing smart contracts. There are a number of libraries available which contain modules that can be used when writing a contract. It is also preferable to reuse such already available modules since this widely reduces the risk of committing an error and saves valuable time to focus on the ‘unique’ features of the contracts at hand. Even when a module needs to be modified to fit some particular needs, reuse of the corresponding tests to ensure nothing gets broken is highly recommended.

Hence, it is always advisable not to overdo the contractor to use fanciful coding techniques. Instead, keep it modest, especially because most contracts used by the public are going to have the corresponding source attached on the blockchain for anybody to inspect and validate. Having a clear, simple contract that is easy to understand gains more trust and is actually less likely to contain flaws than a large over-engineered contract doing way more than actually needed.

Addressing Security

When designing smart contracts, it is important to think about security from the very start. Since contracts are public and visible on the blockchain, everybody can potentially call every function. Even if you do not submit the source code, there is still the bytecode so everyone with the right understanding of the EVM and proper endurance can figure out what the contract does and call it. Hence, it’s not a very good idea to count on security by obscurity. In order to avoid this, most contracts implement the owner pattern that can be used to restrict the highest state “administrator” change functions, like setup, start, stop, and kill.

In order to determine which smart contract development platform is best-suited for a particular requirement, crypto analyst Marco Manoppo recommends building applications on networks that support interoperability between different tokens and blockchains. He explains:

In the future, when blockchain technology has matured … these [independent] blockchains & tokens [should be able] to communicate and operate with [each other]. There will be multiple [chains] in the space, ranging from private to public blockchains, with different use-cases on different parts of the world. For instance, a project that is utilized for patients’ data in the healthcare industry must be able to operate with another project that will be used as a payment channel.

Today, we’re delighted to share that we have been working with fellow Hyperledger members, Blockchain Technology Partners (BTP), to integrate the DAML runtime with Hyperledger Sawtooth! In this blog post, I’ll describe why we believe it’s important to architect a DLT application independently of the platform, why a new language is needed for smart contracts, and why we are working with BTP to integrate it with Hyperledger Sawtooth.

“Following the recent announcement that DAML has been open-sourced, we are delighted that work is already underway to integrate the DAML runtime with Hyperledger Sawtooth. This demonstrates the power of the open source community to enable collaboration and give developers the freedom required to truly move the industry forward.”

Brian Behlendorf, Executive Director of Hyperledger

EY announced today the launch of EY Smart Contract Analyzer, a smart contract testing and security service for the public Ethereum blockchain. The service, now entering a private beta test, will allow users to monitor smart contracts and tokens for known security risks. As companies and investors increasingly turn to blockchain-based tokens and assets, it is becoming crucial to understand the risks involved.

Investors in digital tokens face unique risks because both tokens and contracts are software designed to represent certain business and legal commitments. EY research has found that, in the past, digital tokens may not have accurately reflected claims made in prospectuses or white papers and may not be updated in ways that are agreed by investors.

Built by the EY Blockchain Security Lab in Israel, the EY Smart Contract Analyzer is designed to test and monitor tokens and contracts both prior to their release and once available on public blockchains. EY has developed a list of more than 250 standard tests that cover aspects ranging from known malware and coding errors to standard tests that confirm for investors that tokens are behaving according to accepted industry standards.

RIF Labs has announced the integration of its public blockchain, RSK Smart Contracts, on Microsoft's Azure Marketplace . The RSK Smart Contract Network is an open-source platform that seeks to extend the functionality of Bitcoin using smart contracts and the Azure Marketplace is an app store for Microsoft’s cloud computing service.

Prior to the integration, RIF Labs customers had to deploy local servers while manually setting up and maintaining nodes for running the blockchain. With the addition of RSK Smart Contracts on the marketplace, users can have an RSK blockchain network set up in minutes via Azure.

Adrian Eidelman, RSK strategist and RIF Labs CTO, believes the integration with Microsoft's marketplace allows DApp developers to keep their focus on the product development now that node deployment has been settled.

“DApp developers can now focus on building their product, since they don’t have to worry anymore about spending hours in setting up and maintaining the node,” Eidelman explained in a company statement shared with Bitcoin Magazine . “Microsoft’s support will be key to accelerate adoption of RSK technologies and the Bitcoin ecosystem.”

Neo is a leading blockchain-based platform for developing smart contract-enabled decentralized applications (dApps), and has become an industry leader in the field.

Currently, the company are in the process of building and promoting their latest venture, NEO 3.0, which was the focal point for their conference this past week. On this subject, he said the NEO platform will only support issuing assets “with smart contracts”, and that NEO’s developers are planning to “unify” both asset types so that “there will be no more UTXO assets”.

The conversation also turned to other big players in the blockchain game, namely Ethereum. Hongfei believes “Ethereum currently has the strongest community of developers”. He also said that Ethereum’s development team is “like the go-to solution” and that “if you want to [learn] how to [write proper] smart contracts, [then] you will probably do it on Ethereum.”

The main selling point of systems like Ethereum and EOS is their ability to execute smart contracts, at least according to the supporters of those projects. To them, Bitcoin is simply too limited and conservative, and new approaches are needed to unlock the true power of blockchain technology.

Of course, this is not technically true. While Bitcoin’s scripting language is much less expressive than Ethereum’s (for example), it’s possible to write certain types of smart contracts on Bitcoin as it exists today. Three examples of applications of Bitcoin smart contracts include: Bitcoin’s often-hyped Lightning Network; the recently announced Arwen protocol, which dramatically increases security for traders on exchanges; and Abra, which allows users to peg the value of their bitcoin to many other real world assets.

Multisig addressing is another example of a smart contract, and former Bitcoin Core lead maintainer Gavin Andresen once argued most of what Ethereum is useful for can already be done with Bitcoin’s multisig functionality today. In fact, Andresen wrote about this a little over a year before Ethereum officially launched.