Boosting Transition to Paperless Trade – Mapping Traditional Trade Contracts to Smart Contracts
Distributed ledger technology (DLT), alongside smart contracts, is seen with hope by many actors involved in international trade as a new opportunity to further facilitate and digitalize international trade transactions. In order to mitigate deficiencies of the current legislation, and to avoid pitfalls that limited digitalization of trade in previous decades, a carefully planned transition needs to be conducted. For this reason, we built a solution that eases the transition to paperless by allowing for unobtrusive coexistence of traditional trading contracts and corresponding smart contracts running on the blockchain. Coexistence is achieved by automatically translating relevant trade terms and conditions specified in traditional trading contracts to the corresponding logic implemented in smart contracts.