Smart Contract Templates: essential requirements and design options

Abstract: Smart Contract Templates support legally-enforceable smart contracts, using operational parameters to connect legal agreements to standardised code. In this paper, we explore the design landscape of potential formats for storage and transmission of smart legal agreements. We identify essential requirements and describe a number of key design options, from which we envisage future development of standardised formats for defining and manipulating smart legal agreements. This provides a preliminary step towards supporting industry adoption of legally-enforceable smart contracts.