Smart Contracts and Business Process Transformation

“I’ll give you the property deed once you’ve given me the money!”

Trust, transparency, and security. These are the glues keeping society together for the last thousand years. Businesses and institutions such as banks, software giants, and brokers have made their profits providing intermediary services between multiple parties, ensuring transactions can be trusted and are accurate.

Through the advent of blockchain protocols and distributed ledger technologies, enterprises are now able to utilize applications that enable purpose-built decentralized consensus systems and create programmatic business/rules logic that can be reviewed by all applicable stakeholders.

What does this mean?

Enterprises can now interact with stakeholders such as customers, partners, and internal teams (to name a few) and conduct business in a way where they can transact directly with one another WITHOUT having to rely on third-parties (read: banks, software companies, broker-dealers) to validate or facilitate transactions.

By reducing the number of intermediaries involved and transacting through blockchain-powered infrastructure, businesses can experience immediate benefits in the form of reduced operating costs, improved operating speed, and access to higher quality data.

One of the most exciting functionalities made relevant and popular to businesses today by Ethereum is the idea of Smart Contracts.

We are now able to securely and transparently attach programmatic logic to transactions.

Some practical examples of this include:

• Supply Chains: Rendering of service / ‘proof of completion’ is automatically provided to the participant when the operator receives goods or services. Rates and services can be negotiated and agreed upon digitally and enforced through smart contracts. Supply chain activities and smart contracts are auditable, can be monitored, and promote operational efficiency.
• Fundraising: Companies are able to raise funds from investors and in exchange transfer security tokens (digital representation of shares) to verified parties instantaneously. The…