Using a smart contract as a legal technology: national and foreign legislative practice

The modern period of development of society and the state is characterized by digitalization of all spheres of social life. One of the tools used in the process of digitization of law is a smart contract, which is considered as a program code intended for functioning in an information system and used as a form of fixing a set of obligations between the parties, as well as a method for automated fulfillment of these obligations. The purpose of the study is a comparative law analysis of the practice of legislating the concept of «smart contract» in legal acts of different states and the justification for considering the use of smart contract as a legal technology. The methods: the author uses general scientific methods (system, historical, formal-logical), specific scientific methods (mathematical, linguistic) and special-legal methods (comparative law, legal forecasting, interpretation of law). The results: the study concludes that the use of a smart contract could be considered as a special type of law enforcement technology representing an activity aimed at implementing the subjective rights and legal obligations of legal entities, carried out using self-executing program code that exists in the digital environment, which allows, first, to record and transmit certain legal information (in this case, a smart contract is considered as a type of written contract form), as well as to automate the fulfillment of obligations when certain conditions are met (in this case, a smart contract is understood as an automated technical method for fulfilling obligations).