Smart contracts are built on blockchain technology. This means that the code that defines a smart contract can be fully transparent to all users.
Many smart contracts are built on the Ethereum blockchain. Solidity language, similar to JavaScript, is used to create an Ethereum smart contract.
Smart contracts also have another advantage: they dont require that third parties be involved in ensuring that the contract is executed correctly.
Benefits of Smart Contracts Development for Businesses
These are the benefits of Smart Contracts:
- They create a trusting environment that ascribes accountability to all stakeholders.
- Smart Contracts are transparent because they operate on distributed and decentralized Blockchain networks.
- They are self-executing units and do not need intermediaries such as brokers to confirm an agreement.
- Any manipulation is eliminated by removing middle people from the process.
- Blockchain networks create multiple copies of the code. There are multiple backups of Smart Contracts available across the network.
- Smart Contracts are more secure because they can be cryptographically encoded from end to end.
- Automating business processes is possible through the autonomous execution of code.
- Businesses can eliminate manual intervention and fix any errors in entry points.
- Smart Contracts offer greater value than the sum of all the benefits mentioned.
Top Use Cases of Smart Contracts
Smart contract usage cases can differ from one sector to the next depending on which sector they are used. Let's now see what they are.
Digital Identity
Digital Identity is one of the most prominent smart contract use cases. The individual's identity is one of their most valuable assets.
It includes reputation, data, as well as digital assets. If used correctly, the digital identity can open up new possibilities for the individual.
Digital identity can protect your identity and allow you to share it with the companies you want.
The internet is a way to connect to multiple services simultaneously. Still, you are also knowingly sharing your identity with the companies.
Cross Border Payments
Smart contracts can revolutionize trade finance. It can facilitate international goods transfers and trade payment initiations through a letter of credit.
Smart contracts, which are essentially smart contracts, will increase liquidity and, in turn, improve the financial efficiency of suppliers, buyers, as well as institutions.
Smart contracts can be made to work in Trade finance. This is especially true for cross-border payments.
Financial Data Recording
Any organization needs financial data. Smart contracts are here to help. Smart contracts provide the data records necessary for more transparent and accurate financial data collection.
Smart contracts make it easy to record data uniformly across organizations, which results in lower auditing and reporting costs.
It also reduces accounting costs and improves interoperability between legacy and distributed ledger networks.
Supply Chain Management
The use of blockchain smart contracts in supply chain management is an excellent example. Smart contracts can improve the supply chain in many ways.
It can track products within the supply chain with complete visibility and transparency. A business can use smart-contract-powered supply chains and improve its inventory tracking to a granular level.
Smart contracts also enhance other business aspects directly linked to the supply chain. Smart contracts reduce verification and enhance tracing, which results in fewer thefts and frauds.
Institutions will need to add sensors and equipment to their supply chains to make it work. It's also possible to use smart contracts as an example.
Clinical Trials
Smart contracts can improve clinical trials as they allow for cross-institutional visibility. Smart contracts can automate data sharing between institutions thanks to their automation and privacy-preserving computations.
This is an example of smart contracts in action.
Smart contracts can be used to automate trials and share information between industries. It can be used to identify, authorize, and authenticate the data.
Mortgage System
Smart contracts can be used effectively in the mortgage system. Smart contracts allow mortgages to be automatically processed and make it easier for both the buyer and the seller.
Smart contracts must be coded with the mortgage agreement to make this happen. Once this is done, smart contracts can be implemented and automatically execute each step of the process.
It is quick, inexpensive, and simple.
This is one example of smart contracts in action.
High Securities
Securities are another example of a smart contract's useful use case. Smart contracts make capitalization table management easier and more efficient.
There are no intermediaries between the parties, such as security custody chains. It can be used to pay dividends, automatic payments, liability management, and stock splits.
Smart contracts are also a great way to reduce operational risk and digitize workflows.
Government
Smart contracts help automate. It can be used to help the government manage operations. One such operation is land title recording, which the government can use for property transfers.
Land title recording requires that parties transfer property efficiently and transparently. Smart contracts are a great way to do this.
It will also reduce auditing costs and increase transparency throughout the entire system.
Another use case for government is electronic elections. We also discussed digital identity earlier and electronic record filing.
Based on their requirements, governments can explore smart contract use cases.
Industrial Trends for Smart Contracts in 2022
With much anticipation, the most anticipated technology is now in 2022. Due to its unique features and benefits, there are compelling reasons to adopt the technology in many blockchain trends in 2022.
Lets now discuss the latest trends and developments in blockchain technology.
Environment-Friendly Blockchain
One of the biggest drawbacks to the rising blockchain trends in 2022 is the huge energy consumption. The large power consumption has a negative impact on the environment.
Many of the most popular blockchain protocols require large energy consumption.
Particularly protocols that depend upon Proof of Work require validators to do much computation. The future trends in blockchain technology will increasingly be focused on creating a greener blockchain.
This issue will be more prominent in 2022. The exponential growth in blockchain technology has made crypto an eco-friendly sector.
Central Bank's Cryptocurrencies
It is impossible to imagine that digital currencies would be accepted in any country as a valid payment method. Digital currencies were a confusing and impractical concept in the past.
People are now starting to see the positive side of digital currencies. These digital currencies can be used as payment methods and have a value equal to physical money.
Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) is a digital version of central bank money. It gives banks special benefits at wholesale and retail levels, which also increases financial access for clients.
CBDC stores its data on a digital blockchain ledger. Blockchain technology can improve the security of transactions between individuals and banks.
Development of NFTs
Tokenization is a way to verify a user's right to a virtual or physical asset. NFT was a new trend that emerged in 2021 and the market demand to hire NFT developers also increased gradually.
In just a few months, secondary sales have increased tenfold. The use of tokenization is growing - individuals and businesses already use it.
There is now a whole new market for business relations.
It may be easier to transfer property rights in the future. This will be possible without signing contracts or hiring a lawyer.
One transaction is all it takes to transfer an apartment, car, yacht, painting, meme, or other property.
The Security of Defi Solutions
Security will be a top priority for DeFi protocols in 2022. Security projects that focus on safety and preventing hacker attacks will increase the number of decentralized applications and improve trust in DeFi as an ecosystem.
These could be blockchain-based services or insurance platforms that guarantee cryptocurrency savings. The top cryptocurrencies in the DeFi space to watch are ETH (SOL), Cardano(ADA), and Polkadot.
These third- and fourth-generation chains offer maximum protection while maintaining high scalability.
Best Smart Contract Platforms for 2022
We have now reaffirmed the importance of this not-so-new technology. It is time to look at the top smart contract platforms and compare how they stack up against one another.
Ethereum may be replaced if it is not.
Ethereum
The top smart contract platform is Ethereum. Although most people know the Ethereum Project via its token, Ethereum, Ether, ERC-20, or Ether, few know that it is one of the most innovative start-ups of the past decade.
It is the most preferred choice for crypto developers and the world's largest smart contract platform.
In July 2015, the platform was launched for the first time. It has seen rapid growth and can now facilitate smart contracts for everything, from online games to ICOs.
Most ICOs use the ERC-20 token standards to facilitate their offering.
The best thing about Ethereum smart contract platform is its level of standardization and support. Ethereum has made it easy for developers to follow clearly defined rules, making smart contract development less complicated and riskier.
Hyperledger Fabric
Hyperledger Fabric is second on the list and top of the list for Ethereum smart contract platforms. The Linux Foundation created the Hyperledger project in December 2015.
It is an open-source project to support the development of distributed blockchain ledgers.
Hyperledger is currently developing several frameworks. Hyperledger Indy, Hyperledger Fabric, and Hyperledger Sawtooth are just a few of the frameworks currently being developed under the Hyperledger banner.
Solana
Solana is a project that aims to solve the Blockchain Trilemma and provide scalability for smart contracts without compromising security and decentralization.
Due to the unique Proof of History consensus mechanism, the platform can support a record 65,000 transactions per second.
Solana has processed over $5.5 billion worth of transactions since March 2017. The platform relies on 330 global validators, which charge fees that are more than 1000 times less than Ethereum.
Solana was founded in 2017 by ex-engineers from software giants like Qualcomm, Intel, Dropbox, and Intel. Sam Bankman-Fried (CEO of FTX) and Alameda Research openly recommend it.
Like Polkadot, Solana is unique in its governance, staking, and scaling aspects. Parachains are not used in this example.
Instead, Proof of History and Tower Byzantine Fault tolerance is used to support the network.
Polkadot
Another smart contract platform, Polkadot, was created by Gavin Wood, one of Ethereum's co founders. The ex-CTO realized that ETH was far from being the secure and scalable platform it had hoped for, so he decided to start his blockchain network.
Polkadot was created by Parity Technologies software company, the fifth-largest crypto project in market capitalization.
The Web3 Foundation supports it, an additional team of like-minded people to create a decentralized internet.
Polkadots ability to host parachains within its blockchain network is a hallmark of the platform. This allows the platform to run multiple chains within an existing blockchain.
This is known as sharding. Sharding is a way to scale blockchains so that they can process more transactions.
EOS
EOS is a great idea. Even though it is known for being too centralized, the blockchain network continues to compete for the top spot in smart contract ecosystems.
While far from being the dominant platform in this space, EOS is still an option worth considering for any crypto enthusiast.
Like the other contenders, EOS runs on its consensus model, Delegated Proof-of-Stake. Their platform can process millions of transactions per second using the power of staking.
The system generates blocks quicker and costs less.
EOS uses WebAssembly (WASM) as its virtual machine to execute smart contract executions and C++ to create them.
EOS makes it extremely easy to hire smart contract developers because they are familiar with the software environment.
Must-Have Skills for Smart Contract Developers
Smart contract development is a highly desirable career option due to many factors, including the possibility of working with technology that has a transformative impact on the world and the high demand for smart contract developers in this talent market.
Smart contract development skills are also becoming more relevant. Smart contracts are a continuation of the transition that engineers made in the 1990s from the closed world of mainframes into the open database environment of the Internet.
Developers are now moving to the Web 3.0 tech stack, just as they did in the 1990s, to get a better tech stack.
Technical Skills
Solidity programming is possible with compiled, low-level backend languages like C/C++. People with web development experience or familiarity with languages such as JavaScript and Python should adapt to the lower-level Solidity mindset.
You may be operating on bits of variables.
A full-stack programmer in blockchain will need both these skills. The web3.js and ethers.js libraries are where most interfacing with Solidity smart contracts is done.
While a good developer can manage the backend Solidity contracts and the frontend in JS/Python, a true professional can handle the entire stack.
OpenZeppelins contract library is a great resource. It saves developers the effort of writing common contracts such as token contracts.
Blockchain Languages
Solidity is the main language for blockchain smart contracts, with Vyper being one of its leading competitors. Solidity is not like Python or other interpreted languages.
It's statically typed (variable kinds are declared and compiled), which means you must generate a binary to run it.
Gavin Wood created Solidity to address the unique problems Ethereum encountered in 2014. It is now the default language for all Ethereum Virtual Machines (EVM-compatible chains).
Community
Smart contract space is a place where the community is vital. It's difficult to keep up with all the innovations going on.
The best developers are active on Twitter to network, participate in hackathons to meet developers and potential investors, or get Gitcoin bounties that will help open-source development.
They also engage in thoughtful forums like the Smart Contract Research Forum and Discord to share their knowledge and help others.
The Key Takeaway
According to the basic economic rule, the cost to hire a blockchain developer can be determined.
As per the 2017 annual income report, the average salary of adept blockchain developers is around $150,000-$200,000.
For a professional developer, the cost will be just around double. However, the hourly rates to hire a blockchain developer ranges from $40 up to $200 and higher. By 2032, the market for blockchain technology is expected to reach around $1 trillion in value, according to Statista.
Due to the increasing costs of transactions, there is a huge demand for smart contract ecosystems. Everyone knows the impact congestion has on the industry, even Ethereum.
Investors will have to accept that the market is highly inefficient unless significant changes exist. Why should disruptive and decentralized technology be used when the fees exceed hundreds of thousands of dollars?
