Technology of smart contracts

Blockchain and smart contracts are receiving an ever-growing attention from the industrial and research fields as well as a wide coverage from the media. In fact, while at the beginning, blockchain’s and smart contracts’ core concepts were only mastered by a small group of technology enthusiasts, recently a high number of people with different backgrounds started to show interest in this technology and to discuss the implication of its widespread adoption from different perspectives, such as the economic, the legal, the philosophical, the governmental ones, etc. The objective of this chapter is to provide the reader with a primer on blockchain and smart contracts. Specifically, the chapter will start by presenting the technological aspects blockchain and smart contracts are built upon, by presenting some basic examples which could help to better grasp how this technology works. Then, an overview of existing, soon to be developed, or potential applications of blockchain and smart contracts in different fields will be provided, in order to help the reader understand how they could impact existing processes or, more in general, the society. Finally, among the open issues related to the widespread adoption of blockchain and smart contracts, the chapter will focus on a portion of them, mainly related to the legal and the IT contexts.