Activity Contexts
Toni Mattis, Robert Hirschfeld · 2018
Smart contracts formalize and automate interactions among and between individuals and systems in an executable and decentralized way. They are analogous to objects in object-oriented programming, but their behavior and state is replicated across multiple participants in a network and messages sent to the "object" are relayed to all network participants, allowing everyone to keep its replica up-to-date. Originally introduced in the mid-1990s, their recent surge in popularity is linked to a rising interest in blockchain-backed, general-purpose smart contract platforms.