The Accord Project is an ecosystem to build open source tools for smart legal contracts. Today it announced that it is now a Linux Foundation project. Accord originally started as a standards body. It boasts members from many of the world’s leading law firms as well as high profile players in the blockchain space such as IBM, R3 and the Trusted IOT Alliance.
At first, it was a little surprising that Accord joined the Linux Foundation and not the Foundation’s blockchain offshoot, Hyperledger. But one of Accord’s aims is to be technology neutral. If it became a Hyperledger project, it might be perceived as favoring Hyperledger technologies. That’s our guess, but we’ve requested confirmation.
Smart legal contracts are template contracts with aspects that are automated. So one part is the text you would typically expect to see in a contract. Some elements, such as the parties to the agreement, and figures might be left to fill in the blanks by the blockchain system. This is the “data”. Additionally, there will be some logic, such as when the buyer accepts the work, then payment is automatically scheduled.
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