Smart contracts can be used to increase trust and transparency and decrease friction in the digital transaction experience. Rapid advances are making this technology more accessible and easier to apply to process between different companies or within a single enterprise.

The technology for applying smart contracts to create digital assets and streamline digital transactions continues to evolve, but how do you get started? What does it take to test your smart contract ideas quickly?

A hyped buzzword for a few years now, smart contracts have obvious potential applications for equipment leasing and finance. The technology for applying smart contracts to create digital assets and streamline digital transactions continues to evolve, but our community of thought leaders wanted to know:

  • How do you get started?
  • What does it take to test your ideas quickly?
  • Is it possible to skip the big technical questions about infrastructure, cryptographic proofs, scalability, or what ledgers to use and go straight to trying out your business ideas?

On February 18, 2021, TomorrowZone® kicked off a Winter Series of UnConference sessions with a focus on new approaches to rapidly prototype and test smart contract ideas.

The session, Rapid Evolution of Smart Contracts & New EF Possibilities featured Bart Cant, Founder of ReThink Ledgers, and Manish Grover, Channel & Solutions Portfolio Manager of Digital Asset as guest speakers and lead collaborators.

To examine these questions further, Bart and Manish brought a leasing smart contract prototype created in Daml to the UnConference group, and deployed it live so that we could test it hands-on during the session.

The demo was a game changing example of new smart contracts possibilities, sparking conversation and discussion surrounding business problems and challenges.

“We’ve been exposed to a new technology and seen how much it can accelerate the ability to prototype and test new ideas, but where do those ideas come from and how do you identify the practical use cases?”
– Deborah Reuben

To further stir up the thinking on what’s possible, the session participants were put into smaller groups to break down a business challenge their smart contracts could address, by asking the following questions:

  • What user problems are you focusing on solving?
  • What solutions to those problems are you focusing on?
  • Who are the minimum entities needed to recognize value in the network?
  • What are the transactions involved, between whom, and what assets are associated with transactions?
  • What assets are involved and what is the key information associated with the assets?
  • What value will the participants get from the network? What advantage do you have that competitors would have difficulty matching?
  • How will we know that this network is successful? What business metrics will be impacted?
  • What are some of the ways this network, service, or solution may generate revenue?

“It doesn’t have to take weeks to create smart contract prototypes, we saw it created and got to participate in testing it in the space of two hours.”
– UnConference attendee

If you would like to learn more about smart contract development or try it for yourself, you can find tutorials here. To keep up-to-date with future UnConference – like events from TomorrowZone®, click here to join our mailing list.