Beagle: A New Framework for Smart Contracts Taking Account of Law


Author:Wei-Tek Tsai,Ning Ge, Jiaying Jiang, Kevin Feng, Juan He


Affiliations:Digital Society & Blockchain Laboratory, Beihang University, Beijing, China

School of Software, Beihang University, Beijing, China

Emory University School of Law, Atlanta, Georgia 30329, USA

Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287, USA

Beijing Tiande Technologies, Beijing, China

Andrew International Sandbox Institute, Qingdao, China

IOB Laboratory, National Big Data Comprehensive Experimental Area, Guizhou, China


Abstract:This paper presents a new Beagle framework for Smart Contracts (SCs) taking account of law. Different from previous SC development or execution frameworks, this framework takes a practical approach to integrate law into SCs. Instead of translating legal contracts into codes directly, this paper proposes to treat SCs as a key component of legal contracts, use SCs to partially automate the executions of legal contracts, and produce legal evidence during the process. Thus, the proposed SC design will be significantly different from previous SC designs, not in programming languages to be used, but in the way SCs are designed and executed. This Beagle framework has five stages: SC template development from domain analysis, formal SC model and code development from templates, verification and validation (V&V), SC execution, and runtime

monitoring.


Keywords:Blockchain