Billing and Smart Contracts 

The idea of a transaction is a basic notion in economics and not in that field only Any agreement, regardless of its' goal, its' subject matter and the parties involved, can be viewed as a transaction. Crypto technologies and smart contracts expand considerably the applicable potential for payments transactions. Blockchain technologies can uniformly handle buying and selling as well as exchanges. Smart contracts, for example, can be extremely useful in legal transactions dealing with inheritance, but their main task is to guarantee the unfailing implementation of an agreement by all parties. 

The higher the financial stakes, the less inclined are the parties to trust each other; their main goal becomes, above all, to ensure everyone's complete compliance with the contract's terms and conditions. And although it may be sometimes extremely challenging to apply blockchain technologies to some extraordinarily complex and nuanced legal transactions, it is no doubt that in the future the majority of legal agreements will be run by smart contracts. The history shows us that the least expensive and the most reliable solutions are those that are most likely to succeed in the world. Smart contracts belong to this category of technological tools and, addition to that, they require no trust on part of anyone involved in conducting a legal transaction. 

Here are some of the examples from our future that can illustrate the potential of smart contracts in their application to handling payments for different types of transactions:

Real estate buying and selling (including handling any other form of tokenized assets)

A seller offers a piece of property for sale. A token, electronically identifying the property on sale and the owner's legal right to it, is issued and is kept in the seller's wallet. 

An ad for sale activates the smart contract, created for this transaction, and transfers this token to the specified smart contract, or, to put it differently, it transfers the token to a new wallet, which has the following designation for it: "this token will be given to the one who will be the first to transfer to this wallet the sum of money equal to the value of the property on sale." 

A change in the designation of this smart contract can also transform the transaction into an auction: "this token will be given to the one who transfers to this wallet the largest amount of money that is not lower than the initial price for the property on sale. All other transfers will be returned to their proper originators."

In order to conduct legal transactions, we will not need to master programming. We ourselves will be able to set up our own smart contract, utilizing the accessible native language of the blockchain commands. The online service for carrying out legal transactions will be secured by a decentralized app which will allow their users to build their own smart contract by selecting an appropriate option from the menu's list. You make your selections and then transfer your property token to the wallet of your transaction. And some time later you receive your payment for the property on sale and the property token is then transferred to the buyer. 
  
This is how you can purchase or sell anything, that is tokenized, online. The description of this transaction was intentionally simplified. In reality, things will be a bit more complex. Our developers, for example, will not forget to attach time specifications to the contract as well as many other details appropriate for the sale. And if an important detail is overlooked, the contract will be returned by the auditors for the necessary modifications as it is prescribed by the implemented quality protocol for developing smart contracts. 

Commissions on payments for transactions

You act as an agent for a buyer wishing to purchase a luxury yacht. Your client asked you to select an appropriate model and promised to pay you a commission of 3,5 %. You found the desired yacht on e-bay, received approval from your client and now you set up a smart contract for carrying out a legal transaction for this purchase. You include the 3,5 % of your commission in the smart contract. The owner of the yacht issues a property token for sale and the buyer transfers the required amount to the smart contract's wallet.  The next steps are automatically fulfilled by the smart contract. It awards the 3,5% to you, moves the remaining amount to the seller's account and transfers the property token to the buyer. Now he is a proud owner of the luxury yacht and you can afford a few extra things for yourself from the commission payment your received. Or something like that.  

Undoubtedly, the examples, mentioned above, are the simplest models for conducting transactions on blockchain. Just so that you could see for your self this new trend, the direction in which things are going in the world. And this movement, mind you, is quite rapid. There are already a few ICO projects to be launched that promote the idea of wallets with commissions on transactions as a new basic technology that can, for example, in one swoop, resolve the issue of commission payments for ad network partnerships that has forever been the stumbling block for the advertisers and their clients within the industry. All it takes in this case is a smart contract. Or at least, a series of smart contracts under the management of a decentralized app. 

Designing smart contracts is our favorite pastime at Bit-Labs. And on Friday evenings, the most competent among us, out of inspiration, like to spend the whole night developing a new decentralized app. And, by the way, a decentralized app plus a couple of smart contracts and you have a blockchain-based web service which is not a bad start for a launch of a new ICO project. 

If you are looking for opportunities to utilize smart contracts in your business, if you realize that this new technology can help you solve a number of the existing problems that you may have - be it preventing double sales or simplifying transactions and making them less costly or guaranteeing commission payments to your agents - whatever they may be, our team of experts will be glad to work with you. Please contact us here.