Contract Vault – Online Contract Solutions

Mei 12, 2018

Contract Vault – Online Contract Solutions

Accords de nouvelle génération pour tous les acteurs de la blockchain Ethereum

"New generation agreements for all players in the Ethereum blockchain"

Introducing Contract Vault

Every crypto-enthusiast knows that Blockchain technology creates contractual trust. It is a meaningful record of truth. That is why there are plenty of other startups already promising to improve contracts by using Blockchain. However, we are thinking bigger. Contract Vault is a Blockchain-powered platform on which anyone can develop, use, resell, customise and repurpose legally sound contracts. We are working with world-class legal partners to make creating contracts something that anyone can do, and as simple as drag-and-drop.

Why?

Well, we are not trying to replace the law. Instead, we think Blockchain and Smart Contracts will massively expand the law. We are creating new opportunities for agreements to be verified, witnessed, questioned and arbitrated; bringing fairness and trust to millions of new transactions. Let’s look at a similar example from 20 years ago. Before the internet and eBay, auctions were complex. It was only worth auctioning items of significant value because the logistics and risk all meant that the cost of participating was incredibly high. Enter eBay, and suddenly everyone could sell at auction - plus the audience for goods became global. eBay simply made auctions accessible to everyone. Contract Vault envisions a similar scale of opportunity: until now, contracts have been complicated and only worthwhile for significant agreements. However, with the automation promised by Smart Contracts, the versatility provided by Ricardian Contracts and the scalability of the internet, simple agreements and their fulfilment will be available to more people in more contexts than ever before. Moreover, with a level of trust and certainty that was previously difficult for ordinary people and small businesses to achieve.

Just like eBay, Contract Vault is going to power entirely new transactions and applications, everything from lending money to friends, to more life-changing work. We are already partnered with companies that intend to leverage our platform’s SmartTemplates to create new and exciting applications: companies such as Arkadia Lending, who are building a platform that offers financing for new business projects in developing countries; or Eternitas who are developing Blockchain-based solutions for estate planning.

The Contract Vault opportunity is:

Global: changing the world of trade and legal agreements forever
Positive: creating trust for everyone
Honest: supporting consumers and businesses and the existing legal systems they rely on
Complete: our next generation Smart Contracts are fully legally enforceable
Open to all: Everyone can create contracts in a flash

The Contract Vault Platform

The Contract Vault platform combines a multitude of tools and services to make the creation, distribution and execution of traditional and next-generation smart legal agreements simple.

The above figure provides a high-level overview of the relationship between content providers, users, templates and contracts which will be described in greater detail in the subsequent chapters. The Contract Vault platform currently uses the Ethereum Blockchain for Smart Contracts and Ricardian Contracts. However, as we have already created a layer of abstraction between our markup language SmartML and Solidity code, it is feasible to support additional Smart Contract platforms at some point in the future.

SmartTemplates
SmartEdit
SmartML and SmartEdit usage
Importing

Marketplace

The marketplace is a core part of the Contract Vault vision to provide anyone with easy access to contract templates, whether it is templates for employment agreements under Swiss or Chinese law, Smart Contracts for supply management, Ricardian Contracts for the selling of fine art, or services provided by legal and Blockchain professionals.

Any marketplace is only as useful as the content it holds, or as Bill Gates put it in his 1996 essay: “Content is King”. Contract Vault is first and foremost a technology company and not a content provider. Our job is to provide a platform and toolchain that enables and incentivises content providers to use it. To this end, we are working closely with both legal and technical partners who are committed to providing their services in the marketplace as well as seeding the marketplace with an initial set of SmartTemplates and Subtemplates. These content providers will be provided with an early Beta version of the platform to ensure that they can start the content creation process as early as possible. Furthermore, we intend to incentivise content creation for all jurisdictions and actively recruit service providers both before and after the public launch of the Contract Vault platform.

Pricing : All of the content and services in the marketplace are only purchasable with the VLT token. Because cryptocurrencies can be somewhat volatile, all base prices are set in fiat currencies. The end price in VLT is then dynamically calculated by the platform.
SmartTemplates : Once a user has created a SmartTemplate, they can choose to publish it in the publicly available marketplace for anyone to use and/or in their private instance marketplace where it can only be accessed by their clients. The SmartTemplate’s metadata, such as applicable jurisdictions, language, price and notes help the system classify the SmartTemplate and help with its discoverability.
SmartTemplate creation and review services : A further goal of the Contract Vault marketplace is to make it easy for consumers to access lawyers and programmers who can create custom SmartTemplates for legal agreements and Smart Contracts. This, in turn, creates an ecosystem where said service providers can offer their services directly to a large number of potential customers.
Security audits : With Smart Contracts and especially Ricardian Contracts being used to transfer valuable assets, security audits are vital to ensure that consumers can use these new technologies with confidence. Contract Vault is partnered with industry-leading Blockchain companies who will provide both manual and state-of-the-art automated auditing services in the marketplace. Contract Vault intends to continually add new auditing providers to encourage fair pricing.
Services : In addition to the content in the form of SmartTemplates, service providers can also offer their services directly to consumers in the marketplace. Currently, we envision that services will include manual and automated technical audits, legal reviews, SmartTemplate creation services and arbitration. Similar to the SmartTemplate rating system, users are incentivised to rate and review their experience after using a service or service provider.

Applications

There are no limits when it comes to the use cases of the Contract Vault platform. As already noted, agreements can be modelled as traditional contracts, Smart Contracts or a mixture of both. However, beyond that, the Contract Vault API and Platform-as-a-Service functionality enable the creation of complete Blockchain applications. To further illustrate the benefits of our SmartTemplates and PaaS features and the vast range of potential usages we are listing some featured use cases and applications currently in development or being planned that use or leverage the Contract Vault platform.

Smart Shares :

Aims to solve the following problems with the help of Contract Vault’s Ricardian Contracts and identity services:

Create markets for unlisted companies and manage the exchange of shares.
Create liquidity for what is currently mostly an illiquid asset.
Allow companies to manage their relationships with shareholders via Smart Contracts.
Pay dividends seamlessly with Smart Contracts.

SmartICO :

Working with our technical and legal partners, we are already building the key components of an off-the-shelf ICO architecture for multiple jurisdictions and regulatory environments, which will be available to mix-and-match according to needs, in the Contract Vault Marketplace.

ICO services usually include marketing, legal and tax, token advisory, technical development (website, Smart Contracts, landing page, dashboard) and regulatory compliance (KYC/AML/licenses). SmartICO focuses on what we believe can be optimised and to a degree even automated: the legal framework, efficient token advisory, technical development and regulatory compliance. The goal is to enable compliant, fair and transparent ICOs at a low cost.

Will execution and donations

Smart Contracts have the potential to change estate management and inheritance planning forever. Individuals have so far had to rely on legal intermediaries and inefficient processes for estate planning. The French-German start-up Eternitas5 specialises in estate management and automatised will execution via Smart Contracts. Eternitas intends to create immortal last wills on the Blockchain and an autonomous method for the distribution of assets to beneficiaries using Contract Vault’s powerful, customisable templates and its API.

The Vault token sale

The Contract Vault economy is mainly based on the VLT token. The VLT token will be available starting from May 1, 2018. This whitepaper does not contain any information regarding the token sale. Please visit the document section8 of the Contract Vault website for further information and please note that the linked information is subject to change.

https://www.contractvault.io/token/#document-assetsen/#document-assets

Business model and tokenomics

The Contract Vault platform enables a variety of commercialisation approaches, some of which are elaborated on in this chapter. The examples presented here represent our current intentions based on the planned functionality of the platform. Therefore, the implementation of these or any other revenue streams is subject to change. Contract Vault aims to create a healthy token economy for the VLT token and as such actively promotes the usage of VLT on the platform.

Roadmap

The indicative roadmap and development priorities provided here are subject to change. We plan on releasing a public beta version of the Contract Vault platform in July 2018, which will include: