Enterprise Smart Contracts with Marley Gray

We sign many different types of contracts throughout our lives. We sign a mortgage to get a loan for a house. When we go to the hospital, we sign a piece of paper that defines how our medical data can be shared between organizations. These pieces of paper represent our opting into an agreement that will be mediated and enforced by computer interactions. We can’t see the code behind those computer interactions, and we can’t verify that it is abiding by the contract we agreed to.

Smart contracts allow for the programmatic execution of contractual agreements. Code is law, and there is less ambiguity. The most widely used smart contract platform is the Ethereum blockchain–but several large enterprises are creating their own smart contracts. Should all smart contracts be decentralized, or do enterprise consortium blockchains make sense?

In this episode, Marley Gray from Microsoft joins the show to discuss enterprise smart contracts–why you would want to use them and how they can be architected. Marley has worked on banking and financial technology for over a decade and makes some strong arguments for why banks will adopt smart contracts and the timeline for how that might take place.

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Transcript

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