One of the most highly anticipated use-cases for blockchain technology is the ability to build self-executing or self-enforcing code. Referred to as a “smart contract”, such code has tremendous implications for established industries including finance, technology, media, healthcare, the public sector, and many others. Representing a shift away from pyramidally centralized organizations toward a peer-to-peer economy, these contracts will likely disintermediate a number of traditional occupations, such as lawyers, brokers, financial managers, machine operators and attendants.
In the real estate industry, for example, if you wanted to automate your monthly payment obligations to your landlord, you could create a code to make a payment at a specified date and time. By writing the code to recur each month, you would never worry about accidentally forgetting to meet your obligations. This can be similarly done for loan repayments, employee payrolls, government subsidies, and all types of multi-party financial services and agreements.
In the realm of technology, smart contracts will allow machines to transact directly with each other. For example, with the emergence of electric autonomous vehicles, we will see cars that can process payments, locate charging stations, and communicate with those stations to make payments for re-fueling - all by design with blockchain-based self-enforcing code.
Writing such code, however, is no simple layman’s task, and so enter the blockchain developers who are working at Agrello.
Soon to be built on the Ethereum blockchain, Agrello will be a platform that provides a graphical interface, templates and wizards that allow you to formalize multi-party smart contracts with ease. So whether you are a seasoned coder, or someone with no knowledge of computers whatsoever, Agrello will let you create, manage, and automate smart agreements. And because Agrello templates will be vetted by lawyers and paralegals, the platform’s smart contracts will be legally protected under law.
Founded by a team of Estonian lawyers, and information technology experts, Agrello’s smart agreement solution will yield considerable savings in terms of the time and costs associated with complex information. In addition to saving time and costs, Agrello will provide a scalable solution for the use of blockchain oracles. Oracles manage the transfer of trusted data feeds from external sources into smart-contract based collaborations. In the future of blockchain solutions, there won’t be one mega-oracle that answers all external questions, but composed oracles working to effectively execute smart codes. By including an underlying e-governance layer, Agrello will deploy a scalable, self-healing oracle, with an e-governance enabled voting mechanism that can prevent the enforcement of erroneous code, or eliminate and replace malevolent violations. Thus, if the context of a smart contract is changed, or delivered information is untrustworthy because of a change in context, the Agrello oracle can autonomously make the decision to adjust an obligation.
Figure 1: The Agrello-system architecture in a simplified bi-lateral cross-organizational collaboration scenario. This shows the Agrello contract-template hub in the middle with collaboration self-aware contractual components on the external layer. The conceptual layer comprises a translator between the external and internal layer. Additionally, the conceptual layer contains a self-aware contract setup support component. The internal-layer smart-contract blockchain (e.g., using Ethereum, Lisk, NEM, NEO, Qtum, etc.) is protected in-house of an organization by the conceptual and external layers above it. For more details, we refer the reader to the Agrello Whitepaper.
The Agrello token is called DELTA, an Ethereum ERC20 token that will allow user access to the smart contract building platform (full details about the token design and functionality is available on the Agrello blog). But Agrello’s compatibility won’t be limited to the Ethereum blockchain. With DELTA tokens, users can also build smart contracts to run on Hyperledger, NEO, Ripple, Lisk, Metaverse, QTUM, Rootstock, NEM and Monax. According to Chief Scientist Alex Norta, this will make Agrello a standard universal smart contract solution in a future blockchain universe.
“We already have many interested customers,” Norta told Bitcoin Magazine while discussing his solution. “In Estonia, we have an interested customer that builds IoT systems, as well as interest from the Finnish electronics manufacturer INCAP and interested parties in Japan. It all looks very promising and these industry cases will help us kickstart the platform globally.”
Currently in the second week of its ICO, Agrello has already raised 5,800 BTC ($14.5 million) of its 10,000 BTC target, with US citizens excluded due to securities regulations. Norta says they will be sufficiently funded to begin development of Agrello’s smart contract software, which will include rental and loan agreement graphical user interfaces, employment and service agreement templates, smart agents, a template bank, and mobile applications. Agrello’s global expansion roadmap takes them to the year 2020, when they hope to have a fully deployed solution for every user.
Article co-written with Bradley Fink
