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Smart contracts in view of the civil code

Published: 08 April 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Explicit legal regulation is still lacking in many countries for cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ripple, Ethereum, and others. This is not unusual for a new technology. On top of such cryptocurrencies, another new technology, so-called smart contracts, has been established. Smart contracts are specialized computer code with the aim to automate the exchange of (digital) assets. In decentralized applications (Ðapps), parts of the business logic and the data storage of traditional web applications are replaced with smart contracts. They are credited with considerable potential for commercial use, especially in FinTech but also beyond. Smart contracts mostly lack explicit legal regulation as well. Hitherto there is little experience in applying current law to them. Building a business on uncertain terrain is at least risky. We seek a clarification of smart contracts in the legal context, especially against the background of the Civil Code.

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  • (2025)Smart contracts for efficient resource allocation and management in hyperautomated agricultural information systemsHyperautomation in Precision Agriculture10.1016/B978-0-443-24139-0.00002-3(15-25)Online publication date: 2025
  • (2025)Blockchain in SMEs: Technical Foundations and ApplicationsThe Economic Impact of Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises10.1007/978-3-031-74554-6_11(233-264)Online publication date: 18-Feb-2025
  • (2023)Smart Contract – Problems with Taking Evidence in Polish Civil Proceedings in the Light of European RegulationsBratislava Law Review10.46282/blr.2023.7.1.3087:1(65-76)Online publication date: 30-Jun-2023
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cover image ACM Conferences
SAC '19: Proceedings of the 34th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing
April 2019
2682 pages
ISBN:9781450359337
DOI:10.1145/3297280
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Published: 08 April 2019

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Author Tags

  1. civil code
  2. civil contract
  3. legal aspects
  4. legal validity
  5. smart contract

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Cited By

View all
  • (2025)Smart contracts for efficient resource allocation and management in hyperautomated agricultural information systemsHyperautomation in Precision Agriculture10.1016/B978-0-443-24139-0.00002-3(15-25)Online publication date: 2025
  • (2025)Blockchain in SMEs: Technical Foundations and ApplicationsThe Economic Impact of Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises10.1007/978-3-031-74554-6_11(233-264)Online publication date: 18-Feb-2025
  • (2023)Smart Contract – Problems with Taking Evidence in Polish Civil Proceedings in the Light of European RegulationsBratislava Law Review10.46282/blr.2023.7.1.3087:1(65-76)Online publication date: 30-Jun-2023
  • (2023)Smart Contracts and the LawBlockchain and the Law10.1007/978-94-6265-579-9_8(125-143)Online publication date: 16-Nov-2023

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