Quotes About Smart contract

A smart contract is a mechanism involving digital assets and two or more parties, where some or all of the parties put assets in, and assets are automatically redistributed among those parties according to a formula based on certain data that is not known at the time the contract is initiated.

Ethereum and other smart contract platforms specifically gave rise to the decentralized application, or dApp. The backend components of these applications are built with interoperable, transparent smart contracts that continue to exist if the chain they live on exists. dApps allow peers to interact directly and remove the need for a company to act as a central clearing house for app interactions. It quickly became apparent that the first killer dApps would be financial ones.

A smart contract is code that can create and transform arbitrary data or tokens on top of the blockchain to which it belongs. Powerfully, it allows the user to trustlessly encode rules for any type of transaction and even create scarce assets with specialized functionality. Many of the clauses of traditional business agreements could be shifted to a smart contract, which not only would enumerate but also algorithmically enforce those clauses.

Clauses in a smart contract can cause a transaction to fail and thereby revert all previous steps of the transaction; as a result, transactions are atomic. Atomicity is a critical feature of transactions because funds can move between many contracts (i.e., exchange hands) with the knowledge and security that if one of the conditions is not met, the contract terms reset as if the money never left the starting point.

We will look at two different categories of incentives: (1) staked incentives, which apply to a balance of tokens custodied in a smart contract; and (2) direct incentives, which apply to users within the system who do not have a custodied balance.

In the context of smart contract platforms, an oracle is any data source for reporting information external to the blockchain. How can we create an oracle that can authoritatively speak about off-chain information in a trust-minimized way? Many applications require an oracle, and the implementations exhibit varying degrees of centralization.