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Avalanche is an open-source platform for launching DeFi applications and enterprise blockchain deployments in one interoperable, highly scalable ecosystem. It is the first smart contracts platform that confirms transactions in under one second, supports the entirety of the Ethereum development toolkit and enables millions of independent validators to participate as full block producers. In addition to supporting sub-second finality, Avalanche is capable of throughput orders of magnitude greater than existing blockchain networks (4,500+ transactions/second), and safety thresholds well-above the 51% standards of other networks.

A World Bank report looked at the role smart contracts could play in improving financial services in poorer nations. It found that smart contracts will not alleviate a variety of common impediments to financial inclusion, including credit risk and income irregularity, distance and inaccessibility, limited awareness and financial literacy, and cultural factors. However, they could assist in determining whether a particular insurance product was suitable as well as increasing trust in the product amongst stakeholders. And on short-term loans, smart contracts could increase efficiency with the different phases of a loan cycle, but those phases are already highly automated, so the new technology would be redundant.

Banco Sabadell, Banco Santander, Bankia, BBVA and CaixaBank have successfully completed a proof-of-concept test to enable the execution of payments triggered by smart contracts in blockchain networks. The initiative, coordinated by Iberpay, the company that manages the Spanish Payment System (SNCE), confirmed the viability of employing blockchain technology to the payments sector. The first business case tested deployed a smart contract for the management of bank guarantees to automate the issuing, registering, executing and cancelling customer bank guarantees. Additionally, the case incorporated a 'notary participant' that simulates a State or Court injunction that may approve the execution of the guarantee when the established conditions are met, automatically triggering its associated payment.

This article argues that it is important to distinguish between programmable money and programmable payments because they have different use cases. The example of the e-car is a good use case for a programmable payment. However, the programmability of money is not necessary in this case. Instead, programmable money can be used, for instance, to implement targeted aid payments during crises such as COVID-19. By giving the money paid out to citizens an inherent logic, the government could ensure that the subsidies are spent in a timely fashion and only for predefined things such as food, medicine, or clothes.

The International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA) published four new whitepapers that analyze the legal issues associated with using smart derivatives contracts on distributed ledger technology (DLT). The four papers consider these issues from a French, Irish, Japanese and New York law perspective. An earlier paper published in January explored the topic from the perspective of English and Singaporean law. The analysis concludes that it is unlikely a local court would reject an express choice of law by the contracting parties, whether under ISDA documentation or in any other agreement between the parties and a platform provider. The papers also highlight potential challenges in identifying the precise location of digital assets, which could lead to uncertainty over which jurisdiction's laws would apply.

Gesell money! More than 92 percent of South Korean households have received their emergency disaster relief funds from the government, three weeks after the payouts began. Households were able to choose to receive their share in the form of credit or debit card points, prepaid cards, cash points or gift certificates. The card points, gift certificates and prepaid cards cannot be used online, at large supermarkets or at entertainment venues. Any relief funds not claimed or spent by the Aug. 31 deadline will be regarded as donations to the state.

This study analyzes the impact of digital programmable Euro initiatives on banks, based on interviews with 50 senior experts. We find that both Libra and a Euro CBDC might heavily affect European banks. Experts fear that large-scale financial disintermediation of the financial sector could take place, and digital bank runs could be triggered. Besides these risks, our findings suggest that banks also have the opportunity to develop new business models stemming from these initiatives. Therefore, Libra and a CBDC Euro should not only be seen as threats but also as opportunities.

Bitcoin smart contracts are a tricky beast to tame, but a new language is making them easier to write, democratizing them in a sense. Minsc, created by Bitcoin developer Nadav Ivgi, is a new programming language that makes it easier for developers to create these kinds of contracts so they can build them into bitcoin wallets and other apps more smoothly.

Public blockchain based money is superior to our current intermediated system in this respect, because your programs are not (well, they do not have to be) reliant on the whims of specific service providers who can change their mind at any time. There is only one service provider, and that is the miners in aggregate. They receive your programs (smart contracts) and your instructions (transactions). If your transaction is technically valid, it executes without bias.

Even if these problems for the various forms of programmable money can be overcome, it still leaves the question of what is programmable money for? Robert Sams points to the general potential for innovation, "More likely are the use-cases that don't even exist today and can't exist without programmable money. Use-cases where the contractual form of the deal is changed due to the capabilities of programmable money." Aleksi Grym (head of digitalisation at the Bank of Finland) has a less optimistic view. "Generally, I'm not a fan of new words for old concepts, so in this case I'm asking myself, what would a normal person call 'programmable money'? I think the answer is 'conditional payment'."

This article analyzes from a German legal perspective whether a smart contract can replace a physical contract set up between various business parties. The legal assessment is differentiated between 1) the smart contract itself being the text of the contract, and 2) the smart contract only being used to execute a contract concluded elsewhere. Furthermore, it offers suggestions for the practical implementation.

Ripple Labs received a patent for a smart contract that can use oracles to connect a distributed platform to a variety of different real-world data. Originally filed in June 2018, one example of a use case provided includes using the smart contracts to automatically settle options contracts when pre-agreed conditions are met, such as a company's debt-to-equity ratio hitting a certain threshold. Another example, for the oil industry, is feeding data on the density of a specific crude oil shipment to help a smart contract determine whether to make a trade. http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-adv.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&d=PALL&S1=10,789,068&OS=10,789,068&RS=10,789,068

The World Economic Forum published a governance framework that proposes strategic pathways which can enable interoperability between legacy IT systems and distributed ledger systems. It proposes ways to integrate legacy IT systems with the capabilities of smart contracts without replacing them. This interoperability between these two disparate systems can spawn a new wave of experiments and pilots towards adoption of smart contracts in various applications. It recommends that businesses join open-source communities that build interoperability frameworks.

On August 12 Cardano's "Alonzo" hard fork was completed successfully. The fork enables smart contracts to be written using Plutus scripts, a purpose-built smart contract development language and execution platform using the functional programming language Haskell.

Cardano will hard fork on September 12, at which point the crypto-asset will get functional smart contracts. These can be used for decentralized finance (DeFi), non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and other types of decentralized applications (Dapps). Cardano has managed to capture the third-largest crypto market capitalization among 10,000+ crypto assets.

"Critics are slamming Cardano smart-contract testnet errors and complained that the blockchain wasn't fit for purpose as a decentralized finance (DeFi) platform. Difficulties around multiple users interacting with the protocol at the same time surfaced as developers launched the long-awaited Alonzo testnet, which introduces smart contracts to the platform for the first time. These concurrency issues meant that the first Cardano dApp-a multi-pool decentralized exchange (DEX) named Minswap-was forced to prematurely shut down its testnet."

Avalanche (AVAX) price hit a new all-time high of $68.89, following the announcement that a handful of large funds, including Polychain Capital, Three Arrows Capital and Dragonfly capital, took part in a $230-million funding round for the project. The layer-one protocol which hopes challenge the Ethereum network's dominance among smart contract platforms, is capable of surpassing 4,500 transactions per second with a time to finality of less than 2 seconds. Also, the Avalanche network is cross-chain compatible with Ethereum, meaning any tokens or projects that operate on Ethereum can fully migrate to the Avalanche ecosystem.

"When talking about the programmability of central bank digital currency, one delineation needs to be made clear - the difference between programmable money and programmable payments. The two terms are often used interchangeably, but they actually refer to two very different things."

David Andolfatto explains how the theory of bank runs suggests that stablecoins might be rendered run-proof if their liabilities are properly designed. For example, a *credible* promise to suspend redemptions when redemption activity is abnormally high can serve to discourage runs. He describes how "smart contracts" could be used to bolster the credibility of the threat of suspending redemptions in the event of abnormal redemption activity, and may actually prevent any runs from occurring in the first place.

"Programmable money" is, without doubt, one of the major buzzwords in the blockchain space in 2020. Even though everyone seems to talk about it, we still lack a clear definition and hence common understanding of this term. In this article, we present a taxonomy of programmable money. In particular, we argue that "programmable money" has to be differentiated from "programmable payments". To make this distinction as clear as possible, we develop a framework in which we decompose the payments value chain into three pillars: the contract execution system, the digital payment infrastructure, and the monetary unit.