Abstract
Blockchain- and smart-contract technology enhance the effectiveness and automation of business processes. The rising interest in the development of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO) shows that blockchain technology has the potential to reform business and society. A DAO is an organization wherein business rules are encoded in smart-contract programs that are executed when specified rules are met. The contractual- and business semantics are sine qua non for drafting a legally-binding smart contract in DAO collaborations. Several smart-contract languages (SCLs) exist, such as SPESC, or Symboleo to specify a legally-binding contract. However, their primary focus is on designing and developing smart contracts with the cooperation of IT- and non-IT users. Therefore, this paper fills a gap in the state of the art by specifying a smart-legal-contract markup language (SLCML) for legal- and business constructs to draft a legally-binding DAO. To achieve the paper objective, we first present a formal SCL ontology to describe the legal- and business semantics of a DAO. Secondly, we translate the SCL ontology into SLCML, for which we present the XML schema definition. We demonstrate and evaluate our SLCML language through the specification of a real life-inspired Sale-of-Goods contract. Finally, the SLCML use-case code is translated into Solidity to demonstrate its feasibility for blockchain platform implementations.
Highlights
Blockchain technologies have spawned new business operations and management models since the former overcome information sharing and resource integration in traditional business management [1]
Blockchain technology controls the execution of inter-organizational business processes through smart contracts and enables decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO) [8]
ONTOLOGICAL CONCEPTS AND PROPERTIES We develop the smart-contract languages (SCLs) ontology comprising the concepts and properties that allow the formulation of smart contracting DAO collaboration in a legally-relevant perspective
Summary
Blockchain technologies have spawned new business operations and management models since the former overcome information sharing and resource integration in traditional business management [1]. Blockchain technology controls the execution of inter-organizational business processes through smart contracts and enables decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO) [8]. DAOs use peer-to-peer (P2P) computing without any clouds/servers in a loosely coupled collaboration lifecycle in which software agents participate in smart contracting- setup [16], enactment [17], potential rollbacks, and, orderly termination. This lifecycle facilitates the selection of DAO-provided and used services, smart-contract negotiations and behaviour monitoring during enactment with the possibility of breach management [18].
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