Smart contracts from the contract law perspective: outlining new regulative strategies
Nataliia Filatova-Bilous
Abstract
Abstract Smart contracts nowadays start being widely used in various areas of economic and social life. In most cases smart contracts are somehow related to legal contracts: the former may constitute part of a legal contract, an entire contract, or be used to automate a contract performance. Meanwhile, a question whether modern contract law is applicable to smart contracts is rather debatable, since smart contracts initially were designed to rely only on technical rules embedded in blockchain and considered as self-sufficient instruments capable of addressing various issues which may emerge in practice. However, practice has shown that technical regulation does not often cope with the problems one may face when using smart contracts, which confirms the need for legal regulation. Although smart contracts have many technical peculiarities, they do not make application of contract law provisions totally impossible. Thus, what the modern contract law needs is a set of special rules applicable to the practice of smart contracting.