Blockchain & Smart Contracts
Blockchain is a highly transformative technology, with application across industries and sectors. Operating as a digital, decentralized, and distributed database and backed by cryptography, blockchain ensures secure, tamper resistant, and real-time transactions, revolutionizing the way we understand and conduct business. The digital record-keeping technology expedites transactions and operations, with potential reach across the globe, increases trust and transparency, and minimizes the involvement of third-party intermediaries.
On blockchain, new transactions and data are simultaneously broadcast to the network nodes (distributed ledger) and are recorded once validated through intensive computing processes. Since blockchain is shared in identical copies within the network, altering and falsifying data is extremely difficult, if possible, at all, rendering blockchain tamper resistant. Recording new data uses the previous hash, creating a chain of transparent, secure, validated, and immutable transactions, which is shared in identical copies within the network.
The way blockchain works provides the ground for foundationally novel business models to emerge. While blockchain was initially associated with bitcoin, and, mostly, financial services, the potential of blockchain cannot be so narrowly confined. Indeed, blockchain’s reliable and trustworthy recording and verifying mode attracts virtually all industries and sectors, supporting wide-ranging transactions. Due to significant efficiency gains, blockchain models manage to disrupt and accelerate development in market.
Often discussed alongside blockchain are smart contracts, an equally exciting technology that materializes much of blockchain’s potential. Many recognize smart contracts as the application tool that makes the promise of blockchain a reality. Smart contracts are basically computer codes or programs, operating on blockchain, which contain pre-determined conditions or events, occurrence of which triggers their automatic execution. Smart contracts are, thus, self-, and automatically, executing computer programs. Third-party agency is removed from the execution equation, offering amazing efficiency, time, and cost gains. That smart contracts operate on blockchain means they benefit from all promising and efficient blockchain features. This results in secure, trustworthy, immutable, transparent smart contracts, which execute performance obligations in an automatic, fast, and secure way. Smart contracts substantiate much of blockchain’s potential as an extremely useful technology that ensures the application, performance, and enforcement of recorded conditions.
Our team has been a frontrunner in blockchain development and continues leading through its fast-paced and continuing evolution and use. As such, we are well-positioned to appreciate, and assess the blockchain development, and offer critical advice to our clients. Despite the perception of blockchain as a future and distant business tool, our experience and an analysis of market trends reveal that blockchain offers business-ready, practical, and tangible solutions with current application prospects. Blockchain potential is already materializing through many projects, even though blockchain is still an emerging technology. We have first-hand experience of the varied, wide-ranging, and exciting cases using the technology in an effective and disruptive way. Banking, finance, and payments, insurance, health, real estate, document management, supply chain management, energy is only a small sample of sectors hosting blockchain projects.
Our team’s founder is heavily involved in important initiatives in the blockchain and smart contract regulatory sphere, gaining indispensable and exclusive insight to, and guiding, the advancement of blockchain and smart contract regulation and standards. She is the Cyprus delegate to the ISO TC/307 Blockchain Committee, which develops internationally recognized blockchain standards, actively contributing to the WG-3 on Smart Contracts. ISO seeks to implement standardization in blockchain, to resolve scalability, lack of interoperability, certainty, and technology quality issues. These concerns are embedded in any blockchain project, something that our founder’s ISO experience confirms, and something we apply and consider in offering legal and regulatory solutions to our clients.
Through her involvement in ISO, our firm’s founder has successfully led the inclusion of a Cyprus-based blockchain-enabled project in the ISO-approved catalogue of use cases, affording enormous visibility and promotion of the project to the international blockchain community and investors. This phenomenal success corroborates her unmatched expertise and experience in guiding the establishment and growth of blockchain projects.