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Blockchain technology needs to make a push towards providing utility to everyday people and businesses.

While the fundamental value additive blockchain technology provides is a decentralized currency, the evolution of second generation blockchains that provide smart contracts makes way for a lot more possibilities. A smart economy governed by trustless agreements is now a tangible reality. However, the technical requirements to utilize these is not available at mass scale.

The everyday person does not possess the skillset needed to create the smart contract shown on the right. In fact, even a good portion of developers aren’t familiar with Solidity. Individuals aside, for a technology to benefit commerce at scale, it must be accessible small and medium enterprises—not just major ones. However, smaller businesses do not have the resources to hire a smart contract developer.

For blockchain technology and smart contracts to reach everyday utility, they must be accessible for use to the masses. A new project, Jur, is pursuing the usage of smart contracts for dispute resolution, and its making the underlying contracts accessible to the market.

It Starts with a Marketplace

Jur is a decentralized arbitration protocol which allows anyone to utilize smart contracts as escrows that release funds under certain conditions. However, as Jur intends to integrate its technology into situations that involve physical world interactions, the smart contract cannot handle everything. Thus, Jur’s decentralized aspect extends into including a network of jurors who functions as oracles that deciding on which part, in any dispute, is justifiably deserving of the funds held in the smart contract.

While the oracles allow Jur to extends it’s utility to arbitration of interactions in the physical world, the core of this technology is still the smart contracts that display immutable conditions of the agreement while holding the funds in a trustless mechanism.

Thus, Jur’s ecosystem extends beyond merely providing a protocol and network of oracles.

Jur will also include a marketplace for the smart contracts that can be used as clear formats for the smart contracts being used by everyday people and small/medium businesses. Smart contracts used for arbitration won’t only involve technical know-how, but will also require the need to incorporate legal jargon that is necessary to cover all aspects of an agreement in order to erode the possibility of one party taking advantage of a loophole.

Professionals in the legal industry will be able to provide the smart contracts.

The smart contracts created by professionals could either be used directly or be used as prime formats that could be tweaked to serve the needs of any agreement that involves some form of (trustless) escrow. The professionals creating the smart contracts would be incentivized to create the best possible contracts that are easy to utilize by the mass market as a marketplace is innately competitive.

Jur not only provides the protocol to handle the arbitration and trustless escrow, but it also provides a marketplace where anyone can buy the smart contracts, thus making the technology accessible to anyone.