The advancement of blockchain technology as a decentralised
database, with the ability to store a public registry of assets and
transactions across a shared, trusted, peer-to-peer network, is
lauded as one of the most significant technological innovations
since the internet. Coupled with the sophistication of software
code as a form of communicating information and automating complex
instructions, blockchain technology provides a new means of
recording information and facilitating the exchange of value in the
global economy in a decentralised and immutable way.
At the centre of this battleground lie so-called "smart
contracts", which are essentially agreements reduced to or
replicated in software code whose execution is both automatable and
enforceable. In this article we consider the extent to which
"smart contracts" can replace traditional contracts.
Fundamentally, we believe this rests not only on their operational
and denotational parameters, but also on their
