Legal Nature of Smart Contracts

Abstract

Lately, more and more attention has been paid to the phenomenon of smart-contracts (SC) in legal research. The SCs have already found their application in many aspects of society life and are particularly common in the regulation of legal relations in the area of automated financial services, which may include lending, mortgages, insurance, etc., as well as in public services, including various types of voting, elections, document management, supply and storage. The practical dissemination of SCs is carried out without a conceptual approach in the legal regulation of this object, but also without a unified terminology. The science begins developing approaches to study of the legal nature of SCs and offers options for their legal regulation have been proposed, each of those, of course, has its benefits and disadvantages, which is explained by the multifaceted nature of this phenomenon. First of all, it means a qualitatively new level of functioning of a smart-contract where the technical component overlays on traditional types of legal relations. Both authors of the article used scientific methods such as analysis, synthesis, comparison, induction and deduction. Special attention is paid to different options for understanding the legal nature of smart contracts, proposed by European and domestic scientists.