The oracle as a link between jurisdiction and smart contracts

Abstract

The article has as its central element the study of the impact of the adoption of smart contracts in private relations. The work focuses its approach on the possibility of emptying traditional forms of jurisdiction, due to the characteristic of self-execution of contractual terms, as a consequence of the use of blockchain technology. Blockchain technology has become one of the biggest protagonists in the transformation of digital technologies and this is due to its peculiar characteristic of decentralized information management, in addition to its reliability. The analysis starts from the identification of the intrinsic elements of smart contracts, demonstrating, in a deductive way, their specificities and their points of intersection with the traditional contractual theory. With the expansion of the use of smart contracts to regulate more and more situations of private life, it was established the need to incorporate an exogenous element into the system, which is the figure of the oracle, whose function is to feed external data to the blockchain. There is, therefore, a link between the phenomenal world and the purely virtual world, through blockchain technology. In this way, from the conception of the oracle, the possibility of linking the jurisdiction and smart contracts opens up.