Smart Contract

A smart contract is a means of programmatically exchanging value (currency and assets) on the Internet using blockchain.

Prior to smart contracts, value exchange occurred through:

• Meeting in person and exchanging actual cash (e.g., trading dollars in your pocket for the item you want to purchase)
• Using a trusted, centralized authority. For example, a bank, brokerage or escrow company would be trusted to finalize a transaction for you.

In contrast, smart contracts allow you to write code that exchanges value without any parties needing to trust each other, meet each other and without the intervention of third-party authorities.

Smart contracts have the potential to be as disruptive to finance, art, collecting, real estate, gaming and other industries in the same way that decentralized Web publishing disrupted many other information-intensive industries.