The Smart Contract

Popular blockchain project Tezos has reached a new milestone today, as the number of smart contracts on the network surpassed 10 million for the first time.

Blockchain tech company Madfish Solutions took to popular microblogging platform Twitter to announce the development, saying:

“We congratulate the Tezos community with the first 10 million Smart Contract Calls! It’s a productive year for the Tezos DeFi ecosystem.”

At the time of writing this line, data on Better Call Dev (BCD) suggest that the total number of smart contract calls that have been executed on Tezos blockchain is 10,074,471.

China’s central bank has spelled out terms for the latest progress in its development of a state-backed digital currency as it continues to push ahead with trials of the e-CNY, as the currency is known. Many believe China is trying to widen adoption of the digital money in time for the Beijing Winter Olympics in February.

The People’s Bank of China confirmed in a white paper released on Friday that it had been using smart contracts to “make the e-CNY programmable, more expandable, and better integrated into various scenarios.”

The bank said that e-CNY would obtain programmability from “deploying smart contracts that don’t impair its monetary functions” and which could “facilitate business model innovation.”

The bank, however, did not clarify what kinds of innovation could follow for the adoption of smart contracts.

At a briefing following the release of the white paper, PBOC Deputy Governor Fan Yifei told reporters that many local governments had used smart contracts for e-CNY giveaways to stimulate consumption, and that through collaboration with certain mobile phone makers, the bank had studied dual offline payment and other innovations on mobile devices.

Cardano (ADA) has recently announced that it has successfully conducted the Alonzo White Hard Fork. A tweet posted on Twitter confirmed that the network was now making blocks successfully. And there had been no problems with the hard fork so far.

The hard fork is the next step in bringing the Cardano network closer to smart contracts compatibility. The project has been in the works for a while. And it is speculated that the network will be able to fully support smart contracts by September 2021.

Several Bitcoin developers agree that Taproot will offer a significant improvement in Bitcoin’s privacy. In a conversation with Cointelegraph earlier in June, Pieter Wuille, Bitcoin developer at Chaincode and one of the earliest proponents of the Taproot upgrade, remarked:

“It [Taproot] extends Bitcoin’s script capabilities in ways that make certain things cheaper (especially more complex applications like multisig and layer-two things), and somewhat more private by often hiding what the exact spending rules were.”

Apart from masking certain spending conditions and making transactions indistinguishable, Taproot also offers a significant reduction in the block space occupied by transaction data. While this feature will reduce transaction throughput by compressing the data size associated with multisig transactions, it is hardly a panacea to Bitcoin’s scalability issues.

However, it opens the door for smart contracts on the Bitcoin blockchain since the upgrade already lessens the amount of space needed for multisig transactions in a block. Smart contract transactions by nature involve interactions among several addresses and users.

With Taproot, these smart contract operations will not appear to be any different from a simple wallet-to-wallet BTC transfer. Detailing some of the likely smart contract use cases that could emerge once Taproot is activated later in 2021, Casatta told Cointelegraph:

“In the middle/long term, I see an increase in Bitcoin smart contract usage, enabling use cases like inheritance and delegation in company spendings. And the best part is that, by looking at the blockchain, we will not know about that.”

Many Bitcoin developers agree that beyond the November activation, network participants will need to create useful applications based on the upgrade. The upgrade itself will activate according to the terms in Bitcoin Improvement Protocol 341 (BIP-341) at block height 709,632.

Taproot will be a soft-fork upgrade, meaning that network participants are not bound to adopt the change. However, given the likely fee advantages offered by the upgrade, service providers are likely to update their software to implement Taproot.

More than $31 billion worth of ADA is now staked ahead of the Cardano Alonzo smart contract launch. The crypto community has been anticipating the launch of the anticipated hard fork, Alonzo, since Cardano’s announcement earlier this year. The long-awaited hard fork is drawing near with preliminary plans pointing to a launch sometime in August.

Cardano is a blockchain platform that competes with Ethereum (CCC:ETH-USD) and other smart contract platforms. It does not use a validation system like Bitcoin (CCC:BTC-USD), which requires hash mining and a proof-of-work (POW) system to reward validators. Cardano uses a proof-of-stake (POS) blockchain validation system. They call it Ouroboros. This POS system does not require the heavy use of electricity that POW systems require.

Cardano is now very close to rolling out its next phase of software development called the Alonzo testnet. This rollout is actually the last part of the third phase of its development called the Goguen phase, which will issue smart contracts and native blockchains. (The Goguen phase is named after computer scientist Joseph Goguen.)

Smart contracts are essentially software-coded apps built on a blockchain platform where there is no company keeping the information you enter or provide to the app. The decentralized blockchain keeps the information; hence, they are often called Dapps (decentralized applications).

The Alonzo introduction of smart contracts is expected to start in Aug. 2021. This should also help with the popularity of the ADA token since it will allow Cardano blockchains to compete against Ethereum’s smart contracts.

Smart contracts represent the intersection of technology and law, and therefore challenge practitioners, scholars and legislators — many legal issues have been debated. Smart contracts have been called out as neither smart nor a contract. First, there is neither a commonly agreed-upon definition nor a unified, structured and systematic classification of smart contracts. There is no common agreement or understanding about the relationship between smart contracts and traditional legal contracts. Some scholars question the ability to create valid, binding legal contracts through a smart contract.

Increasingly, there are also considerable concerns related to Anti-Money Laundering (AML)/Combating the Financing of Terrorism (CFT) requirements, as well as privacy and confidentiality issues. Immutability and automated, unstoppable execution are also potential legal pitfalls for smart contract use.

This analysis is made more difficult since there are different types and models of smart contracts, depending on their legal relevance (if any), context and technical properties. They vary from simple, straightforward and standardized payment instructions, to sophisticated instruments capable of the autonomous performance of a complicated sequence of actions. The emergence of blockchain-based smart contracts also brought a new dimension to the notion of cyberspace self-regulation. Moreover, discussions about “code is law” and “Lex Cryptographia” ensued.

Crypto exchange Coinbase Global Inc (NASDAQ: COIN) has launched a smart contract security tool called Solidify to detect and classify smart risks within crypto protocols.

The new tool was unveiled by Coinbase’s Principal Blockchain Security Engineer Peter Kacherginsky, who said in a blog post that Solidify would help “automate, standardize, and scale” their due diligence process for new token listings.

Beyond Oil™ has officially launched the Solar Oil Project - the blockchain powered platform that recycles abandoned wells to produce oil while eliminating a trillion dollar ecological nightmare.

What the Solar Oil Project does differently:

The project partners with local oil Operators and green equipment manufacturers.

Together, they identify old oil wells that typically produce less than 5 barrels of oil per day.

These wells often become serious ecological hazards when abandoned and leak toxins into the soil and water table. Current clean up costs for these wells is estimated to be over $500billion dollars in North America.

With this new technology, cost of production drops by as much as 50% and carbon footprint is reduced by over 90%.

Expected oil production from this method requires no new drilling, is solar powered, and vastly profitable with expected gross ROI of over 500% over its 10 year term.

he core component that brings privacy and anonymity in RAILGUN is the utilization of Zero-Knowledge Proofs. Similar to how Zcash works, RAILGUN utilizes zk-SNARKs to prove that shielded transactions are valid without revealing any information about the sender, the recipient or the transaction amount.

Once the proof is verified by the smart contract, then it updates the Merkle tree which accumulates all generated notes (i.e. encrypted balance owned by a public-key controlled by the recipient), and nullifies the consumed notes (i.e. owned by the sender). This prevents users from double-spending or creating money out of thin air. To put it simply, zksnarks is a proving system, and “zero-knowledge” means the verifier gains no knowledge about the transaction’s sender, recipient or amounts, giving users complete privacy and anonymity.

Railgun comes with what users have come to expect in terms of a modern user experience. If they’ve used MetaMask or any other popular wallet it will be transparently familiar. They won’t have to worry about how the zk-SNARK proofs are generated or verified or how the RAILGUN smart contracts protect their privacy. All the complex tasks are handled by the wallet itself, with no additional complexity to the users. Furthermore, it’s open-source so anyone can audit it at their own will.

Today, Ethereum has reached a new milestone with over 25% of all ETH supply locked behind smart contracts, a notable increase over the 15% during last year.

As pointed out by ETHhub founder, Anthony Sassano, the current ETH supply percentage under smart contracts is similar to what it was during the DAO event in 2016.

My InvestorPlace colleague Larry Ramer recently argued that it makes far more sense to invest in Ethereum (CCC:ETH-USD) than Cardano. He believes that “betting on a more established player in a new sector is less risky than betting on a challenger in a new sector.”

After all, Ethereum has a market capitalization of $295.4 billion compared to just $50.1 billion for Cardano. It’s akin to investing in Toyota (NYSE:TM) over Nio (NYSE:NIO).

The team at Chainlink (LINK), the developers for decentralized Oracles and various other solutions for blockchain and smart contract platforms, are announcing that registration is currently open for Chainlink’s Summer 2021 Smart Contract Developer Bootcamp.

The Chainlink team notes that the program is designed to help with accelerating the ongoing “wave of innovation” and adoption in the fast-evolving smart contract ecosystem. Chainlink’s developer bootcamp will aim to provide application developers with a practical, hands-on, guided experience so they can start creating solutions with Solidity smart contracts and Chainlink Oracles.

Program participants will learn how to create the “next generation” of hybrid smart contracts.

Built specifically for software engineers starting out their journey into blockchain or distributed ledger tech (DLT) and smart contracts, Chainlink’s first smart contract developer bootcamp will cover the following:

The fundamentals of blockchain technology, Ethereum, and smart contracts

How to write, deploy, and interact with smart contracts in Solidity

How to use Chainlink to create hybrid smart contracts that use off-chain data and computation

How to work with development environments such as Hardhat and Brownie.

Smart contracts represent the intersection of technology and law, and therefore challenge practitioners, scholars and legislators — many legal issues have been debated. Smart contracts have been called out as neither smart nor a contract. First, there is neither a commonly agreed-upon definition nor a unified, structured and systematic classification of smart contracts. There is no common agreement or understanding about the relationship between smart contracts and traditional legal contracts. Some scholars question the ability to create valid, binding legal contracts through a smart contract.

Discussions are ongoing in regard to applicable legal frameworks and how to reconcile the immutability of blockchain records with contractual mistakes or contractual deficiencies. Similar concerns have been raised about amending smart contracts’ terms recorded on an immutable ledger. Also governing law and applicable jurisdiction are particularly relevant issues for borderless, decentralized blockchain networks on which smart contracts are being deployed. Consumer protection and duty of information issues are also being raised.

Ether, the native cryptocurrency on the Ethereum blockchain, is no longer the most popular cryptocurrency on the platform: Stablecoins are, according to new analysis by Messari.

Though Ethereum has its own cryptocurrency, there are thousands of tokens that run on the platform. Some of these platforms are stablecoins, assets that are tied to the value of another currency, like the US dollar or gold.

Traditionally, the majority of value being transferred across Ethereum has been in ether. But now stablecoins have taken over. Due to the rise of US dollar stablecoin Tether on the Ethereum blockchain, more value is transferred on Ethereum using stablecoins than its own native cryptocurrency.

“Ethereum’s economy is now dominated by stable value transfer,” tweeted Ryan Watkins, a research analyst at Messari. He said the flip happened in mid-2019, and the gap has widened ever since.

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.