Smart contracts or future contracts

“El País” publishes an expert opinion article on Smart Contracts

Legal experts, José María Anguiano, partner at Garrigues, Pablo García Mexía, advisor to Ashurst and David Maeztu, partner at 451 Legal, share their knowledge about these contracts.

Smart contracts are the contracts of the future, the clauses of the traditional paper-based contract will be replaced by a conditional computer code, in which the parties (always humans) program different results for a variety of possibilities.

This code along, together with the identity of the parties and the list of oracles (sources of information that trigger scheduled events), is incorporated into a distributed blockchain registry, which attributes an unalterable identifier or hash. This blockchain is a network of impartial observers called “nodes” that become notaries and prevent the parties from altering the agreement.

But Jose Maria Anguiano points out that “should not be forgotten that blockchain is basically an evidentiary mechanism for events that can be invoked, but this mechanism does not issue certificates”. He clarifies that “there are, however, centralized, undistributed registries, such as Logalty, that do issue these certificates (documents better understood at court)”.