MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING FOREIGN TRADE UNIVERSITY MASTER THESIS SMART CONTRACT – ACHIEVEMENT OF BLOCKCHAIN APPLICATION, LOOPHOLES AND RECOMMENDATION FOR VIETNAM Specialization: Master of International Trade Law and Policy HO MINH KHUE Hanoi - 2020 Luan van MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING FOREIGN TRADE UNIVERSITY MASTER THESIS SMART CONTRACT – ACHIEVEMENT OF BLOCKCHAIN APPLICATION, LOOPHOLES AND RECOMMENDATION FOR VIETNAM Major: International economics Specialization: Master of International Trade Law and Policy Code: 8310106 Full name: Ho Minh Khue Supervisor: Dr. Nguyen Ngoc Ha Hanoi- 2020 Luan van i STATEMENT OF ORIGINAL AUTHORSHIP I, Ho Minh Khue, confirm that this Master thesis has been written solely by the undersigned and contains the work of no other person or people except where explicitly identified to the contrary. I also state that said Master thesis has not been submitted elsewhere for the fulfillment of any other qualification. I make this statement in full knowledge of and understanding that, should it be found to be false, I will not receive a grade and many face disciplinary proceedings.
Signature: Date: 23rd March 2020 Luan van ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my special thanks of gratitude to my supervisor Dr. Nguyen Ngoc Ha as well as our principal, Faculty of Graduate Studies and all professors of Foreign Trade University who game the golden opportunity to do this wonderful projects on the topic “Smart contract – Achievement of Blockchain application, loopholes and recommendation for Vietnam”, which also helped me in doing a lot of research and I came to know about so many new things I am really thankful to them. Secondly, I would also like to thank my parents and friends who helped me a lot in finalizing this project within the limited time frame. Luan van iii CONTENTS STATEMENT OF ORIGINAL AUTHORSHIP.
ii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS. iv LIST OF TABLE SUMMARY OF THESIS RESEARCH RESULTS.1 CHAPTER 1: UNDERSTANDING OF BLOCKCHAIN APPLICATION AND SMART CONTRACTS. Definition of Blockchain and how it works. History, definition and types of Blockchain.
Development of Blockchain recently. Fundamental of Smart contracts. Definition, characteristics and mechanisms of Smart contract. Benefit and potential application of Smart contract in realistic.
Overview about challenges of Smart contracts.33 CHAPTER 2: SITUATIONS OF SMART CONTRACTS WITHIN CURRENT FRAMEWORKS. Overview framework and policy of Smart contract in some countries. Current legal frameworks in some countries. Problematic aspects that arise with Smart contracts.
Technically difficulty posed by smart contract development. Smart contracts and contract law .50 CHAPTER 3: RECOMMENDATION FOR VIETNAM. Actual situation of Blockchain application in Vietnam. Contracts and Smart contracts regulation in Vietnam.
Lessons from framework and policy of Smart contracts for Vietnam. Principles for the Blockchain Act. Issues relate to the law and blockchain. Issues relate to smart legal contracts .89 LIST OF REFERENCES .91 Luan van iv LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS No Abbreviation Description 1 IoT Internet of Things 2 P2P Peer to Peer 3 TCP Transmission Control Protocol 4 PoW Proof of Work 5 DLT Distributed ledger technology 6 PGP Pretty Good Privacy 7 ICO Initial Coin Offering 8 ID Identification 9 DAO Decentralized organizations 10 dApp Decentralized applications 11 GDPR General Data Protection Regulation Luan van v LIST OF TABLE Table 1.1: Public Permissionless and Private permitted Blockchain .2: Traditional and smart contracts .1: How smart contracts work .19 Luan van vi SUMMARY OF THESIS RESEARCH RESULTS The birth of "smart contracts" have based on developments in the emerging field of Blockchain application: computerized transaction protocols which autonomously execute the terms of a contract.
With a lot of advantages which I will analyze below, Smart contracts are really offering the promise of increased commercial efficiency, lower transaction and legal costs, and anonymous transacting. However, beside of benefits they bring into, there are equally significant concerns that smart contracts will encounter considerable difficulty adapting to current legal frameworks regulating contracts across jurisdictions. This thesis hopes considers the potential issues, loopholes within legal and practical enforceability that arise from the use of smart contracts and gives recommendation for Vietnam. Luan van 1 INTRODUCTION 1.
Importance of the study Blockchain application has been popular, adopted and growing rapidly both in academia and industry. This growth is driven by the unique features of Blockchains: providing reliability, integrity, and auditability in a decentralized system. Thanks to advantages of Blockchain techonology, such as possible event- driven, self-executing code statements, smart contracts were born. These contracts autonomously execute prespecified tasks, such as settling a contract, by examining changing environmental conditions in conjunction with the contract‘s embedded rules.
Smart contracts are envisioned to have a range of innovative applications, such as privacy preserving transactive energy systems, asset tracking in the IoT, and various financial applications. Unfortunately, due to the peculiarities of smart contract platforms and languages, the development of smart contracts has proven to be a challenging and error-prone process. These errors often manifest as security vulnerabilities, which have led to multiple notable security incidents, with losses in therange of hundreds of millions of dollars worth of cryptocurrencies. Specially, framework and policy about smart contracts in countries is uncompleted.
Although this is not a priori bad nor cause for concern cause technology has always driven societal change, and the law has a long history and plenty of experience adapting to such change, at the same time, history shows us that technology must also be open to adapt to existing law where the law reflects the values and consensus of society, weakness of them will bring some disadvantages to many people using. In this study, I investigated Blockchain technology and smart contracts, particularly the legal implications of smart contracts. I would like to enhance the understanding of smart contracts by providing an overview of legal issues to smart contracts and some points of my view to recommendations to Vietnam for the 4. Literature review Blockchain and smart contracts have the potential to disrupt several business domains, ranging from supply chain and healthcare to finance and accounting.
Similar to the status of the internet about two to three decades ago, there is currently tremendous excitement over the potential of Blockchain and smart contracts. However, this is a pretty new session, particularly in Vietnam, there is not anything of acts or regulations or researches about them. News or information of them is also limited, there is just a article named "Negotiation with code - uncompleted legal issues" on 6th April, 2018 of Civil and Network by Ms. Dieu Thao Vu Thi.
The fields of application of smart contracts are numerous. They can be used, at least in theory, wherever economic assets show interfaces to the internet and certain events can be verified digitally. Thanks to the increasing IoT, this affects more and more areas. In addition to the financial and insurance sectors, which have been particularly present up to now, smart contracts are suitable for use in areas such as Sharing Economy, Energy, Supply Chain or Identity Control.
Naturally, contracts that deal with access to digital content, and are therefore easily translatable into software, are predestined for smart contracts. A noteworthy example is the distribution of music via Blockchain-based smart contracts. Recognizing of importance of Blockchain and smart contracts, there are some researches in these fields, special in legislation: With smart contracts the drafting stage of the contract ex ante, leading to an automatic execution, will become more important than subsequent law enforcement ex post. The development of this new contract concept requires a modification of the applicable contract law is a big question.
The answer to that depends mainly on how this new way of contracting is accommodated by existing legal provisions. I can list some researches related to issues, which are: - Cardozo Blockchain Project, Smart Contracts & Legal Enforceability (2018) accessed 22 January 2018. Luan van 3 - Riccardo de Caria, A Digital Revolution in International Trade, The International Legal Framework for Blockchain Technologies, Virtual Currencies and Smart Contracts: Challenges and Opportunity. - Alexander Savelyev, Contract law 2.0: "smart" contracts as the beginning of the end of classic contract law.
With collection many articles and researches of foreign authors in this field, I would like to send general view and recommend personal ideas in Blockchain application and smart contracts, particularly in smart contracts legal making in Vietnam. The results of this study will enhance the understanding of Blockchain and smart contracts, and help other organizations in Vietnam adopting the technology do so successfully. Objectives This study contributes the concept of smart contracts by considering the legal issues that do or may arise from their use. It begins by briefly introducing the reader to the paper outlines peculiarities of Blockchain technology and which forms the core of Smart contracts, focus on main characteristic features of Smart contracts are described.
Besides, the paper outlines key tensions between recent laws, particular contract law in connection with Smart contracts to show off legal challenges or loopholes. It then proceeds to examine in detail the principal legal issues arising from the use of smart contracts, focussing upon actual and potential conflicts with established principles of contract law. Finally, concludes by cautiously welcoming the dawn of smart contracts but foretelling of potential difficulties that lie ahead for commercial parties and lawmakers in Vietnam. Scope In the context of technology revolution today, this potentially breakthrough technology also implies a legal revolution: do blockchain technologies, and smart contracts require new legal avenues to be developed.
However there are many questions claimed, are recent laws of Smart contracts in many countries and provisions of some organizations from over the world sufficient? And, how are and should they be regulated to be trick with quickly development of technology? A Luan van 4 specific object of inquiry in this regard is the role of Uncitral and its potentially crucial contribution it can provide to the creation of a worldwide legal environment that is suitable for the development of blockchain-based applications, contracts, businesses, and so forth.the issue of resolving trade disputes arising between countries has always been recognized as complex. The thesis could not address all the issues, but focuses on the following contents: Theoretical basically issues of understanding about Blockchain and Smart contracts; the current law in some countries about smart contracts and form that voice challenges and loopholes of law regulated Smart contracts; recommendations for Vietnam to improve law and policies about Blockchain and Smart contracts. Research questions Research Questions: In this study, I aim to answer the following research questions. •RQ1: What are the main legal issues in smart contract related discussions? •RQ2: What are the characteristics about smart contracts of legal developers in some countries? •RQ3: What lessons for Vietnam from legislation of developing countries about smart contracts? 6.
Methodology First, I perform standard statistical analysis on the posts that i collected from books, articles and discussions on the Internet. I consider the tag distribution of these posts to find the tags that are most frequently mentioned in smart contract posts. These tags help us to identify the most popular topics among smart contract developers. It is necessary to look at the actual textual content of the posts to discover the main discussion topics.
The second step of my studies statistics of smart contract discussions to understand of smart contracts. I consider the number of posts related to smart contracts found on the Internet and some on libraries and the ratio of answered and unanswered questions, consists of data preprocessing to prepare the study. Luan van 5 Besides, the topic is studied on dialectical materialist perspective, combined with methods of statistical analysis, synthesis methods, comparisons, historical methods and developmental methods. The thesis is also carried out from the point of view of the State of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam through guidelines and policies on economic integration and development in the new era.
The thesis is presented by the method of analysis, interpretation and inductive combined with comparative and statistical methods.