Digital Enforceable Contracts (DEC): Making Smart Contracts Smarter

Abstract

The combination of smart contracts with blockchain technology enables the authentication of the contract and limits the risks of non-compliance. In principle, smart contracts can be processed more efficiently compared to traditional paper-based contracts. However, current smart contracts have very limited capabilities with respect to normative representations, making them too distant from actual contracts. In order to reduce this gap, the paper presents an architectural analysis to see the role of computational artifacts in terms of various ex-ante and ex-post enforcement mechanisms. The proposed framework is assessed using scenarios concerning data-sharing operations bound by legal requirements from the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and data-sharing agreements.

Smart contracts

“…Relevant extensions enabled by oracles concern ex-post enforcement mechanisms and dispute resolution by means of witnesses, juries and other roles (e.g. Kleros), or more advanced ex-ante enforcement controls by means of external reasoners (see e.g., Idelberg et al, 2016;Liu et al, 2020).…”