Smart contracts can be implemented for any industry where required, but most current use cases are related to the financial industry.
This is due to the fact that blockchain found many use cases in the Finance industry first and sparked great research interest in the financial industry long before other industries.
Self-Executing Code That’s Transforming Business (Part 2)
Recent work in smart contract space specific to the financial industry has proposed the idea of smart contract templates.
The idea is to build standard templates that provide a framework to support legal agreements for financial instruments.
The paper also proposed that domain-specific languages should be built to support design and implementation of smart contract templates.
A language named CLACK, a common language for augmented contract knowledge has been proposed, and research has begun to develop the language.
This language is intended to be very rich and provide a large variety of functions ranging from supporting legal prose to the ability to be executed on multiple platforms and cryptographic functions.
Recent work to develop smart contract templates that support legally enforceable smart contracts have been carried out by Clack et al.
Why This Matters for Blockchain Technology
This proposal has been discussed in their research paper Smart Contract Templates: essential requirements and design options.
The main aim of this paper is to investigate how legal prose can be linked with code using a markup language.
It also covers that how smart legal agreements can be created, formatted, executed, and serialized for storage and transmission.
This is an ongoing work and an open area for further research and development.
Key Points to Remember
- Smart contract templates Smart contracts can be implemented for any industry where required, but most current use cases are related to the financial industry.
- This is due to the fact that blockchain found many use cases in the Finance industry first and sparked great research interest in the financial industry long before other industries.
- Recent work in smart contract space specific to the financial industry has proposed the idea of smart contract templates.
- The idea is to build standard templates that provide a framework to support legal agreements for financial instruments.
Going Deeper: Advanced Concepts
Contracts in the finance industry is not a new concept, and various domain-specific language DSLs are already in use in the financial industry to provide specific language for a specific domain.
For example, there are DSLs available that support development of insurance products, represent energy derivatives, or are being used to build trading strategies.
A comprehensive list of financial domain-specific languages can be found at http://www.dslfin.org/resources.html.
It is also important to understand the concept of domain-specific languages as this type of languages can be developed to program smart contracts.
Conclusion
Smart contract templates represents one of the many innovative layers that make blockchain technology so powerful and transformative. As distributed systems continue to evolve, a solid understanding of these core concepts becomes increasingly valuable — not just for developers, but for anyone building, investing in, or working alongside blockchain-powered systems.
Whether you are just starting your blockchain journey or deepening existing expertise, mastering these fundamentals gives you the tools to think clearly about decentralized systems and make smarter decisions in this rapidly evolving space.