From 2014-2016, financial folks talked about Bitcoin as if it was an oddity. Now, it's mainstream.
The same thing is happening to smart contracts and oracles. Today many folks look at them with crooked looks. Over the next decade, they will increasingly become the norm. Why?
- Smart contracts can be designed to automate the agreement and performance aspects of a contract.
- They rely on digital assets, enabling near real-time payment and/or settlement.
- They enable the low-cost distribution of assets to multiple parties simultaneously.
- They enable folks to represent/ transfers digitally assets in units that are smaller than today.
- They make it easier to divide legal rights that were once bundled (e.g., governance and profit rights)
- They rely on oracles like #chainlink and @UMAprotocol enabling rapid settlements of positions.
- They can hold pooled capital, redefining what it means for market makers, funds, clearinghouses, and exchanges.
- They can be used to streamline voting (direct and proxy).
@UMAprotocol - They can be managed by a community, potentially lessening the need for trade associations and rules maintained by exchanges.
- They are composable, meaning one contract can seamlessly work with another contract at a software level, enabling emergent applications.
@UMAprotocol Smart contracts may not work for all contracts and likely will be mostly used in crypto native marketplaces and applications.
But, they are poised to play a big role in the commercial world, as blockchain entrepreneurs continue in their quest to build a global, permissionless financial system.
If you are in finance or a legal professional, you should begin to understand smart contracts and related concepts like oracles and Ricardian contracts.
Even if you have skepticism about whether blockchain technology will scale or succeed, the mechanics being explored today by blockchain technologists will likely bleed into other domains.
Technologists told you about Bitcoin and possibly stablecoins and you may have shrugged it off, but now there are robust policy conversations about digitizing fiat currencies in the US, EU, and China.
Once we have widely distributed, stable digital assets, smart contracts become increasingly useful. Paper contracts have a half live and it's decaying rapidly.
Thousands of developers are exploring not just how to digital assets, but also contracts. These smart contract marines are aiming to push society forward, replacing inscrutible legal text with community supported and run smart contracts with dynamic oracles.
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It's becoming increasingly clear that blockchain technology and generative AI will be two key trends that will shape the future of the Internet.
These two tech trends will converge. And, without blockchains, we'll run the risk of entering into an "age of incoherence"
As we're seeing in real-time, AI is rapidly evolving and is poised to revolutionize a wide range of industries. But with the explosion of content that AI will generate, there is a clear need for a way to authenticate and verify that content
This is where blockchain technology comes in. By using a decentralized, distributed data structure to authenticate and verify data, blockchains can help ensure the integrity and credibility of the information that is being generated by AI
The bill makes it possible to create an entity that is actually called a "DAO"; that's just really cool.
You will be able to transact with an organization called "XYZ, DAO."
DAO's can take any shape developers want. It can be flat and democratically managed or algorithmically managed. You even can explore more hierarchical structures (but, imho that's less exciting)
There aren't significant legal restraints in the shape of DAOs.
Curious why Ethereum is gaining ground? Ethereum currently is seeing exponential from two simultaneous growth curves and there are three growing in the wings. Long thread below 👇
The first is #defi. The growth of #defi has been hyperbolic. The last time we saw this was when the entire ecosystem of digital assets grew from just over ten billion to $100 billion over the course of several months in late 2016 early 2017
It's showing no signs of stopping, as we're witnessing oracles like @ChainLink help support more complex automated financial systems.
The above article is great progress, but I think underappreciates some of the core technical characteristics embedded into / are being built on top of these networks.
With blockchain, the world can get:
1) digital property rights 2) censor resistance (i.e., digital-first amendment rights) 3) democratic voting schemes 4) globally accessible/permissionless marketplaces 5) universal and non-centrally managed identification systems