Problems of legal regulation of smart contracts

Abstract

Recently smart contracts become more and more popular in such areas as initial coins offering (ICO), financial sector, international trade and public services. At the same time there is almost no legal regulation of smart contracts. There are unsuccessfull tries to regulate smart contracts bu security legislation. There are continuing discussions over whether a smart contract can be considered a civil contract and whether violated rights of the parties of smart contract could be protected in trail. The purpose of this article is to assess the practice of legal regulation of smart contracts worldwide and in Ukraine and to develop proposals for improvement of legal regulation of smart contracts. An analysis of law regulation of smart contracts in different countries of the world shows the initial state of the law in this area, significant differences between national systems of law and almost complete absence of judicial precedents. Most countries are trying to regulate smart contracts by securities and financial instruments legislation, which neither takes into account the economic nor legal nature of the smart contract. The greatest progress in legal regulation has reached Belarus, which has recognized the smart contract as a type of civil contract and cryptocurrency as the official means of payment. In Ukraine, despite the active implementation of blockchain technology in state registers, there is no legal regulation of smart contracts and cryptocurrency. The Government Concept of the development of digital economy and society for 2018 – 2020 and conclusions of financial regulators on the legal status of cryptocurrencies determine the need to develop legal regulation of the digital economy. In my oppinion, Ukraine should recognize the most widespread cryptocurrencies as official means of payment and issue its own state cryptocurrency. The legal regulation of tokens used in initial coins offering should be similar to the legal regulation of of debt securities. It is necessary to amend the civil legislation in order to recognize a smart contract as a type of civil contract expressed in the form of programming code and automatically executed in a distributed network. To minimize risks of smart contracts it is necessary to state requirements of mandatory identification of parties and to implement mandatory electronic application containing the essential terms of the contract which will have legal force in case of a programming code error and to resolve litigation between the parties.