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A brief history of smart contracts

When you hear Smart Contracts, you often think Ethereum or blockchain. But what if I told you that Smart Contracts have been used for over a quarter of a century?

A smart contract is a software that’s enforcing the terms of a contract-like arrangement between third parties. Such an agreement reduces the need for you to trust a third party, as it offloads reliance to the smart contract owner.

Smart Contracts Before Blockchain

I recently invited Dean Tribble, the CEO of Agoric and software engineering legend to come on my podcast and talk about Smart contracts and Chain Abstraction. I’ll leave some links down below if you like to listen to the entire conversation.

🎧 Listen on Spotify | Apple Music | Youtube

What I didn’t know at the time is that Dean co-authored the first production smart contract back in 1989 — AMiX.

AMiX

AMiX was an online information marketplace.

When people contracted with each other through the AMIX system, they expressed the contract in two parts: one that both human and the AMIX software could understand, and that the AMIX software could enforce; and the other as free form text only for humans…