The latest assay by enquiry business firm Gartner has painted a mixed moving picture of the benefits that blockchain-based smart contracts can offering enterprises.

While the study, published Jan. 30, ended that smart contracts would be overall net positive for business, Gartner warned that the terms and conditions set for smart contracts could limit the availability of data for enterprises:

"This variable could leave participants in a worse position than if they did non participate in the blockchain smart contract process. As such, an organization's overall data asset availability would decrease by 30 percent by 2023."

Nonetheless, an enterprise can expect to see the quality of its data increase by 50% by 2023 if information technology adopts blockchain smart contracts, Gartner senior research director Lydia Clougherty Jones said.

Smart contracts are a net positive

Even though the availability of certain data assets might become more limited, Gartner said blockchain smart contract adoption will take profound and benign implications for conclusion making in enterprises. It will also eternalize ROI (return on investment) on data and analytics.

Automatic, continual verification would ensure that data quality is more reliable and trustworthy, then that decision making can be more than transparent, efficient and granular, the study claimed.

Senior research director Clougherty Jones said that their usage would reduce the costs associated with hiring third-party intermediaries — whether they be bankers, escrow agents, and lawyers. In their stead, "code is police" provides a most certainty of trusted exchange:

"In one case deployed, blockchain smart contracts are immutable and irrevocable through nonmodifiable code, which enforces a bounden commitment to exercise or not practice something in the futurity."

The analysts at Gartner advise piloting smart contracts to automate bones business organisation processes, such every bit not-sensitive data distributions or basic contract information for management purposes.

If successful, these pilots can then be expanded to automate multi-political party contracts with external partners within a defined ecosystem, beyond areas such every bit banking, finance, existent manor, insurance and utilities.

Adoption of the technology at scale is reportedly faster in Asian Pacific countries such as Singapore and Australia, yet business worldwide would practise well to have a more proactive stance, the report concludes.

A new smart contract driven privacy network on Ethereum

On Feb. 1, the Aztec privacy network officially launched on the Ethereum blockchain. Past fashion of Zcash-based technology — which hinges on the utilise of Aztec's Cryptography Engine smart contract — its goal is to deliver three primal privacy cornerstones on the network. The last of these, Aztec CEO Thomas Walton-Pocock told Cointelegraph, "volition eventually permit private smart contracts to execute with but one trusted setup."