Blockchain-based smart contract for international business – a framework

Smart contracts are computer codes that represent contract terms and are designed to run on a blockchain platform, automatically enforced upon receiving predetermined inputs. This technological innovation, a key component of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, provides an advanced and innovative approach to executing contract terms. Incorporating this technology into Shariah-compliant contracts within Islamic Banks (IBs) holds the potential to reduce Shariah non-compliance risk (SNC) and enhance operational transparency, ensuring compatibility with contemporary technological applications. In particular, blockchain-based smart contracts have the potential to be integrated into the operations of IBs’ products that are based on tawarruq contracts. This study aims to investigate the potential application of blockchain-based smart contract technology in tawarruq contract operations within IBs and to suggest directions for future research. This study adopted a qualitative approach, drawing on relevant literature. The findings indicated that blockchain-based smart contracts can address Shariah Non-Compliance (SNC) issues in IB’s tawarruq operations while enhancing transaction transparency. This paper discussed the Shariah and operational challenges associated with blockchain technology and posits that blockchain-based smart contracts can improve the practices of tawarruq contracts within Islamic Banks. This paper offers insights for IB entities and regulatory authorities to evaluate the potential and impact of blockchain-based smart contracts within their operations and the broader financial system.

Smart contracts on a blockchain network can be implemented to control digital value. A key question that arises is the extent to which smart contracts can, or should, operate as “smart legal contracts”. Simply put, can smart contracts meet requirements of validity at law and practical efficacy. In order to achieve the goal of value maximization, the efforts of policy-makers, standards organisations and regulators should be informed by first principles. Standards, and other regulatory activities, must be driven by consideration of the techno-legal functions of contracting. Blockchain-based smart contracts offer the potential to reduce transaction costs through new methods of stateful computation. When applied to commercial transactions, smart contracts can represent enforcement of an executed state. This paper argues that distributed ledger and smart contracts standards should seek to provide sufficient flexibility to facilitate contracting parties to coordinate in an optimal manner.

The world today has realized the vast technological evolution that has greatly shaped the production and management functions of business enterprises. Traditional contracts can take weeks or even months to initiate, and there have been numerous instances of breaches and lack of trust for contracts in both the private and public sector. A smart contract can be defined as a self-executing contract that utilizes blockchain technology to digitally enforce, verify, or facilitate the performance or negotiation of a contract. Owing to the security and decentralized system exhibited by blockchain technology, smart contracts can foster transaction credibility between contracting parties without the necessity of third parties as exhibited in traditional contracts. Any business organization that aims at achieving greater heights in management and production dimensions must consider utilizing robust technologies that are aimed at bolstering its competitive edge. Owing to the newness of smart contracts, characterized by very few studies on the same, this research reviews how smart contracts through blockchain technology can be implemented in an organization to enhance performance and outlines the applications, benefits, and limitations associated with such contracts. Keywords: Blockchain technology; smart contracts; smart contract applications; smart contract benefits; smart contract implementation; cryptography; cryptocurrency DOI : 10.7176/JIEA/9-5-07 Publication date :September 30 th 2019

A smart contract is a concept of computer protocols that helps to facilitate blockchain technology. This blockchain-based smart contract is a public ledger of all participating transactions. It is considered a self-executable application and contains predetermined rules. It also operates by decentralizing networks that are shared between all parties, and this execution of contracts between parties could be securely done without a middleman or a third party. With blockchain technology, developers could provide an efficient framework and ensure security issues. While the new blockchain has successfully been developed to prevent the problems of fraud and hacking, there is still a considerable risk concerning security and confidentiality. Therefore, we should not underestimate this matter. This study aims to review the potential risks that may take place on blockchain-based smart contracts. In addition, the options that may assist application developers in order to provide viable guidance, and to avoiding these security vulnerabilities.

Imminent changes to the international monetary system alongside a shift toward more egalitarian principles of justice in commercial contracts for trade are now taking place. Such changes however do not sufficiently account for circumstances of hardship, or black-swan events such as COVID-19, whereby the relative losers of trading arrangements should continue to receive outcomes which are not only efficient, but also fair and resilient. We argue that the ‘Society-in-the-Loop’ (SITL) social contract paradigm, in conjunction with the use of Strategic Responsible Innovation Management (StRIM), can together provide a solution for improving distributive justice in trade. Through collaboration with a locally based trade facilitation company, we describe the innovation-planning phase of a blockchain smart contract solution based on Derek Leben's idea of a ‘Rawlsian Algorithm’ (2017). It is demonstrated how this can be used to strengthen the algorithmic fairness of commercial contract implementation in accordance with existing ISO 20022 standards. Since currently no formal design framework exists for modeling blockchain oriented software (BOS), an agile development approach is adopted which takes account of the substantial difference between traditional software development and smart contracts. This method involves the construction of UML Use Case, Sequence, and Class diagrams, with a view to blockchain specificities. Evaluation and feedback from the company is also considered.

Introduction: Although blockchain technology and smart contracts are garnering attention in various sectors, their applications and familiarity within the realm of radiology remain largely unexplored. Blockchain, a decentralized digital ledger technology, offers secure, transparent, and resilient data management by distributing the verification process across a network of independent entities. This decentralized technology presents a possible solution for a range of healthcare challenges, from secure data transfer to automated verification processes. To address such challenges in the context of medical imaging, blockchain could provide different approaches, including smart contracts, machine learning algorithms, and the secure dissemination of large files among key stakeholders such as patients, healthcare providers, and institutions. This manuscript aims to explore the current attitudes and perspectives of trainees and radiologists to the utilization of blockchain technology and smart contracts in clinical radiology. Additionally, the study provides an in-depth analysis of the potential applications for incorporating blockchain into radiology.Methods: After obtaining The George Washington University Committee on Human Research Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval, we conducted a 10-question survey among radiologists and trainees at several institutions and private practices. Surveys were created via the Google Forms application and were emailed to potential participants. Participants were asked about their current academic level (medical student, resident/fellow, academic radiologist, private practice radiologist, others), their knowledge level about the field of imaging informatics and blockchain and smart contract technologies, their level of interest in learning more about blockchain and smart contracts, and their opinion about possible applications of blockchain and smart contract in the future of medical imaging.Results: A total of 118 survey requests were distributed; 83 were returned, reflecting a 70.3% overall response rate. Of these, 19 were sent to private practices with a 15.8% response rate (3/19), and 99 to academic centers, yielding an 80.8% response rate (80/99). The survey respondents demonstrated a strong interest and need to further understand these technologies among radiologists and trainees. This study focuses on key components of this technology as it relates to healthcare and the practice of radiology, including data storage, patient care, secure communication, and automation, as well as strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) analysis.Discussion: To our knowledge, this is the first study to investigate and establish a baseline for the current perspectives on the application of blockchain technology and smart contracts in clinical radiology amongst trainees and radiologists across academic and private settings. Incorporating blockchain and smart contracts technologies into the field of radiology has the potential to achieve greater efficiency, security, and patient empowerment. However, the adoption of this technology comes with challenges, such as infrastructure, interoperability, scalability, and regulatory compliance. Collaboration between radiologists, hospital administration, policymakers, technology developers, and patient advocacy organizations will help guide and advance our understanding of the potential applications of blockchain and smart contracts in radiology and healthcare.

Blockchain technology and its applications are gaining popularity day by day. It is a ground-breaking technology that allows users to communicate without the need of a trusted middleman. A smart contract (self-executable code) is deployed on the blockchain and auto executes due to a triggering condition. In a no-trust contracting environment, smart contracts can establish trust among parties. Terms and conditions embedded in smart contracts will be imposed immediately when specified criteria have been fulfilled. Due to this, the malicious assailants have a special interest in smart contracts. Blockchains are immutable means if some transaction is deployed or recorded on the blockchain, it becomes unalterable. Thus, smart contracts must be analyzed to ensure zero security vulnerabilities or flaws before deploying the same on the blockchain because a single vulnerability can lead to the loss of millions. For analyzing the security vulnerabilities of smart contracts, various analysis tools have been developed to create safe and secure smart contracts. This paper presents a systematic review on Ethereum smart contracts analysis tools. Initially, these tools are categorized into static and dynamic analysis tools. Thereafter, different sources code analysis techniques are studied such as taint analysis, symbolic execution, and fuzzing techniques. In total, 86 security analysis tools developed for Ethereum blockchain smart contract are analyzed regardless of tool type and analysis approach. Finally, the paper highlights some challenges and future recommendations in the field of Ethereum smart contracts.

As the mobility of global capital is getting higher, more and more investors tend to invest in overseas real estate. However, the conventional model of investing in real estate possesses several disadvantages including high entry hurdles, low levels of market liquidity, and low transparency, particularly for retail investors. This article will seek to establish how blockchain technology as applied in smart contracts can help in the clarification of unclear fragmented investments in overseas property. First of all, this paper begins with the definition and examples of applying conventional and advanced blockchain technology and then describes the work of smart contracts and the comparison between regular contracts and smart contracts. The paper also evaluates the nature of fragmented investment in overseas property and its associated risks before suggesting the use of blockchain and smart contracts for a new institutional structure of the investment platform. This study demonstrates how the technologies can advance data sec, promote trust in transactions, and how investment can be automated. It can be concluded that blockchain technology, and smart contracts, can enhance Overseas Real Estate Investment by increasing transparency and decreasing the investment threshold as well as the instances of fraud. This study also presents an analysis of the potential difficulties that may be encountered in real-world applications and a recommendation of what may be done in subsequent studies. On one hand, this research offers a new perspective to the theoretical world, on the other hand, it offers practical problems and solutions to the practitioners who are a part of overseas real estate markets and businesses by steadily helping the overseas real estate markets to move in the fairer and more transparent direction.

Blockchain-based smart contract platforms have traditionally employed the transaction-driven execution model. This paper presents an alternate framework for blockchain-based smart contract execution called EDSC. Our platform design presents a novel approach to tackle the scalability and performance challenges facing the smart contract ecosystem. We base EDSC's design on the Ethereum template, and it can be readily implemented for other existing smart contract platforms. To evaluate our design, we perform an experimental implementation using the Ethereum client. Our experiments with performance modeling show, on average, a 2.2 to 4.6 times reduced total latency of event-triggered smart contracts, demonstrating the effectiveness of the design in supporting time-sensitive applications. Additionally, we comment on the design's potential security aspects and demonstrate its utility by discussing potential use cases.

With the growing utility of blockchain technology, the desire for reciprocal interactions among different blockchains is growing. However, most operational blockchain networks currently operate in a standalone setting. This fragmentation in the form of isolated blockchains creates interoperability difficulties, inhibiting the adoption of blockchains in various ecosystems. Interoperability is a key factor in the healthcare domain for sharing EHRs of patients registered in independent blockchain networks. Each blockchain network could have its own rules and regulations, obstructing the exchange of EHRs for improving diagnosis and treatments. Examples include patients being treated by healthcare providers in different countries or regions, or within one country but with a different set of rules per state or emirate. By contrast, a federation of blockchain networks can provide better communication and service to stakeholders in healthcare. Thus, solutions for facilitating inter-blockchain communication in such a blockchain federation are needed. However, this possibility has not been fully explored, and further investigations are still being conducted. Hence, the present study proposes a transaction-based smart contract triggering system for inter-blockchain communication, enabling EHR sharing among independent blockchains. We use local and global smart contracts that will be executed once a transaction is created in the blockchain. Local smart contracts are used for EHR sharing within the blockchain, whereas global smart contracts are used for EHR sharing among independent blockchains. The experimental setup is conducted using the Hyperledger Fabric blockchain platform. Inter-blockchain communication between two independent fabric networks is conducted through a global smart contract using Hyperledger Cactus for EHR sharing in a health federation setup. To the best of our knowledge, our study is the first to implement an inter-blockchain communication model in the healthcare domain.

Smart contract is a computer program that can execute contract terms using Blockchain technology. The contract has started getting applied in financial services or used to assist companies in managing the financial aspects of the trading, and was presumed to undertake the trading, banking, and insurance industries in the applications, processes, and business models. The objective of this paper focuses to discuss on the possibility to apply the smart contract in Islamic trade finance practice and to understand how the smart contract works. This study will explore the smart contract technology, whether it is Sharia compliance and well as the advantages of the smart contract. Besides that to understand the context of smart contract which is one of the technologies from Blockchain that holds great potential across the Islamic trade finance. This study will refer to secondary data such as online journal, books, and news. Resulting to understand the context of smart contract, this study will show how the usage of smart contract can have a huge impact in the future of Islamic trade finance. The recommendations will emphasis on the roles of traders to grab the opportunity and adapting the smart contract technology in their business practices with the fact that smart contract will expect stronger growth in the future.

<div class="section abstract"><div class="htmlview paragraph">As electric vehicles adoption becomes more common, power grid operators are facing new challenges in managing the unpredictable and varying energy demands in the existing electrical infrastructure. Moreover, the cost of Electric vehicle is high when compared to fuel vehicle it has limited access to charging infrastructure along with the driving range that act as a key barrier preventing the drivers from making shift to EVs. When the EV usage integrates with blockchain, it mitigates the limitation in charging station infrastructure along with the former problem discussed. The lack of trust exists between EV owners and charging station providers can be solved through secure and transparent payment processing possible by blockchain based smart contract. Building charging station on blockchain will ease the automated payment through the use of smart contract and create more efficient EV charging network. Also, the blockchain-based charging system would enable EV owners know if they are being charged in excess and Prosumer know if they are being underpaid. The high initial cost is another prominent issue within the market place. To address this issue the introduction of sharing economy to the EV industry showcases another innovative solution that blockchain offers. The blockchain enabled sharing economy platform allows individuals to access collaboratively with the prosumer and the consumer. This provides alternative to traditional ownership while reduces individual financial barriers and maximizing electric vehicle utilization across the network. The EV users have great opportunity worldwide to take a stake in the future of EV adoption on blockchain. Therefore, this work demonstrates the sharing economy while designing, building, and customizing smart contracts for prosumers and consumers by enabling decentralized payment systems. Our research aims to develop decentralized charging electronic payment systems using blockchain and customized smart contracts to build and design the application. For blockchain Solidity programming language is used. The application displays the charging process, payment system, and charging history information.</div></div>

Blockchain and drone technologies can operate in cooperation with each other. As the number of drones increases, managing them becomes a significant challenge. A swarm of drones, also referred to as swarm drones, must operate reliably and securely. In this study, blockchain technology is utilized through a smart contract to ensure both security and reliability. Swarm drones are deployed for surveillance missions, where each execution corresponds to a single mission. These missions are represented using a simple model. A smart contract maintains the essential mission data in the model. The mission is divided into smaller tasks. Until all the tasks are completed, they are executed by drones in parallel. The smart contract, implemented on the Ethereum platform, securely exchanges information with the drones. The proposed model functions dynamically. It reorganizes when drones leave or new drones join the system. Because blockchain platforms have limited resources, particularly in memory and the number of permissible execution operations, optimizations are applied to both the smart contract and drone programs to accommodate these constraints within the surveillance framework. The proposed surveillance model is implemented and simulated to analyze its dynamic behavior.

In collaborative environments, where enterprises interact each other’s without a centralised authority that ensures trust among them, the ability of providing cross-organisational services must be enabled also between mutually untrusting participants. Blockchain platforms and smart contracts have been proposed to implement collaborative processes. However, current solutions are platform-dependent and deploy on-chain the whole process, thus increasing the execution costs of smart contracts if deployed on permissionless blockchain. In this paper, we propose an approach that includes criteria to identify trust-demanding objects and activities in collaborative processes, a model to describe smart contracts in a platform-independent way and guidelines to deploy them in a blockchain. To this aim, a three-layered model is used to describe: (i) the collaborative process, represented in BPMN, where the business expert is supported to add annotations that identify trust-demanding objects and activities; (ii) Abstract Smart Contracts based on trust-demanding objects and activities only and specified by means of descriptors, that are independent from any blockchain technology; (iii) Concrete Smart Contracts, that implement abstract ones and are deployed over a specific blockchain, enabling the creation of a repository where a single descriptor is associated with multiple implementations. The flexibility and reduced costs of the approach, due to the smart contracts abstraction and the use of blockchain only when necessary, are discussed with a case study on remote monitoring services in the digital factory.

Information and communication technology based inter-organizational systems enable companies to integrate information and conduct business electronically across different parts of the organization. For organizations embracing blockchain, smart contracts provide automation and operational efficiency for inter-organizational systems. Initially utilised for financial transactions, smart contract are extended beyond banking and deployed in wide number of organizations. Smart contracts are regarded as self-executing type of contract consisting of agreement’s terms embedded directly into the code which plays a vital role in operability for inter-organizational systems, however, smart contract vulnerabilities can arise due to programming errors, leading to security issues. The effects of smart contract vulnerabilities can be significant, including loss of funds, unauthorized access to sensitive information, manipulation of data, and loss of trust in the application leading to catastrophic financial losses followed by legal implications for an organization based on blockchain technology. The goal of smart contracts exploiting vulnerabilities is to discover and eliminate potential security vulnerabilities in smart contract code prior to it being deployed. Detecting vulnerabilities in a timely manner helps to prevent financial losses, unauthorized access, and data manipulation. In order to provide a robust solution to detect vulnerabilities in smart contracts, the proposed methodology presents a novel approach for rapid detection of vulnerabilities by integrating genetic algorithm with isolation forest. Furthermore, enhancing smart contract vulnerability identification with higher accuracy and false-positive rate provides a reliable gateway for organizations to adopt blockchain.