Designing a smart-contract application layer for transacting decentralized autonomous organizations

Abstract

This keynote paper addresses existing problems with traditional non-machine readable contracts that are based on trust. Such contracts have mostly a ceremonial purpose between transacting business parties and when conflicts occur, traditional contracts are often not enforcible. On the other hand, so called smart contracts that are machine readable and supported by blockchain-technology transaction-alities, do not require qualitative trust between contracting parties as blockchain establish instead a quantitative notion of trust. However, currently existing smart-contract solutions that equip the protocol layer on top of blockchains with Turing-complete programming languages, lead to the false claim by industry practitioners they can manage smart contracts successfully. Instead, it is important to start considering the currently missing application layer for smart contracts.