The Wall Street Blockchain Alliance (WSBA), a non-profit trade association whose aim is to guide blockchain adoption by financial markets, has joined the Accord Project.
The Accord Project’s focus is not on smart contracts, which may not be legally binding, but smart legal contracts, which are. The Project aims to create standards for these smart legal contracts and already boasts members from across the legal and technology industries. More than 40 leading legal firms are partners, and the standards are designed to work with major blockchain technologies such as Ethereum, Hyperledger Fabric, and R3’s Corda.
Together the two organisations will identify use cases for smart legal contracts and develop code and best practices for them within the financial services industry.
They will also explore the role that oracles could play in the execution of these contracts. For the non-computer scientists, oracles are agents that find and verify real-world occurrences or data and submit that information to the smart legal contract. For example, this would help smart legal contracts accurately and automatically execute insurance pay outs after a natural disaster. An oracle would provide the data about the disaster.
Co-director of the Accord Project, Houman Shadab, commented: “Financial services is an
industry with vast potential to be improved by widely-used open source code that implements distributed ledger technology in transactional legal practice and contract operations.”
Chairman of the WSBA, Ron Quaranta, echoes that sentiment: “We are excited to partner with the Accord Project, and can think of no better steward for guiding the development and implementation of smart legal contract technology. We at the WSBA look forward to closely working with the Project and our fellow members to further the shared goal of facilitating adoption of blockchain technology throughout the financial sector.”
