Scope

Invented in 1994, at the dawn of the Internet and when modern cryptography became mature, Smart Contracts (contracts partially or completely written in code) promised to improve our contractual relationships by enforcing clauses, such as payments, and enabling multiple parties to operate at distance. Over the last twenty years, financial services and other sectors have used some form of smart contract (e.g. the development of algorithmic trading). In the last few years, with the advent of blockchain, smart contracts have created the potential to impact several aspects of our lives. 

This section of the journal will specifically consider smart contracts that run on the Blockchain (or Distributed Ledger Technology). We are interested in understanding how blockchain technology can make smart contracts more useful to businesses and society, and what the challenges and limitations ahead are, both from a technical and a legal point of view. 

While we are familiar with contracts written in natural language and understand what it means to sign such a contract, our relationships with smart contracts is yet to be defined by the technological advances and elimination of barriers to adoption. This section of the Frontier on Blockchains is multidisciplinary: computer scientists, mathematicians, engineers, members of the legal profession, and the social science have a space to come together to explore and shape the vision of smart contracts.

We welcome submissions covering, but not limited to, the following topics:

• Privacy and anonymity in smart contracts
• Business advantages and risks of using smart contracts
• Extended exemplary use cases
• Legal challenges in considering smart contracts as legally binding
• Technical risks in adopting the code to enforce smart contracts
• Technical challenges in translating contracts written in natural language into code
• Challenges in interpreting the code of smart contracts
• Best practices in adoptions of smart contracts
• Barriers to adoptions of smart contracts
• Social implications to the use of smart contracts
  
  

We solicit both original publications that will help a wide community working on smart contracts to advance the field, and surveys that will help the community to understand the current state of the field.

Frontiers is delighted to announce a journal-wide prize of 10,000 USD, “Yun Family Frontiers in Blockchain Prize".  This prize is in collaboration with the Yun Family and associate entities, and will be awarded to the best paper published in 2019.

Submission

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