Understanding Smart Contracts and Their Potential in Agricultural Transactions
摘要
Evolution of Smart Contracts has become the trending technology to address the Agricultural Transactions. People involved in the agricultural sector including farmers, buyers, distributors, retailers, cooperatives, logistics, supply chain providers, financial bodies and others are facing inefficiencies, such as delayed payments, manipulation of prices, and conflicts owing to the dependence on intermediaries. Smart contracts support to crack these problems by automatically carrying out agreements when business logic is met without involving third party to overcome the non-repudiation and other disputes. Among the most promising usage of smart contracts in agriculture is the automation of crop sales and payments. Farmers may make agreements with buyers so payments are automatically processed immediately after the delivery is confirmed, ensuring fair and timely payment to the farmers. This, in turn, promotes supply chain management through smart contracts that permit instantaneous monitoring of agricultural products, minimize fraud and validate authenticity. Smart contracts have a significant role to play in agricultural insurance too. They allow for the automated settlement of claims based on affected weather and crop data by removing the long process of compensation. Since smart contract is visible to everyone and data cannot be modified from the distributed ledger, all the agricultural data are visible to all the connected people in the blockchain network.