A Legally Relevant Socio-Technical Language Development for Smart Contracts

Smart contracts play an advent role in automated business participation by rendering collaboration processes more time-efficient, cost-effective and establishing more transparency. Smart contracts facilitate trust-less systems, without the need for intervention from third-party intermediaries. Existing smart-contract languages mainly focus on technical utility and do not take into consideration social and legally relevant issues, e.g., lack of semantics, ontological completeness, and so on. In this research, we address the gap by developing with rigorous means a smart contract's language that aims to be legally relevant, and that comprises socio-technical utility for cross-organizational business collaboration. The proposed language seeks to retain the strengths of the already existing languages of different generations while eluding their limitations. We aim to identify and implement abstract grammar patterns for a smart-contract language that has the expected application utility and verifiability. We evaluate the developed language based on automating industry-collaboration cases with our novel smart-contract language to test the suitability, utility, and expressiveness.