Since its initial development as the enabling technology behind Bitcoin, blockchain technology has been applied to many problems across numerous industries. Fundamentally, blockchain is interesting because it may be able to provide improvements to traditional information systems by enabling greater transparency, immutability, and the ability to share information without relying on intermediaries to validate a single version of the truth. We are interested in using this emerging technology to help find solutions to regulatory issues in different sectors in the global economy.
In this paper, we look at the possibility of using blockchain technology to build what we call “Smart Contract Registries” to maintain records of specific types of contracts to improve the regulation in certain sectors, namely, Finance and Real Estate. Smart Contract Registries, in short, are distributed blockchain-based applications which store semi-automated digital agreements specific to each regulatory environment. We argue that these can be used to improve upon the regulation in sectors which require auditable records, and to enforce contracts terms both automatically and dynamically based on changing underlying factors (like fluctuations in market conditions). To do this, we introduce two proposed solutions for regulatory issues in the derivatives market and pre-construction real estate development properties. In each of these use case, we illustrate the business process logic flows and discuss how the specific applications could improve the current regulatory processes. We believe that these can be used as a model to apply the concept of Smart Contract Registries to other regulatory environments to solve similar problems.
The paper is outlined as follows: First, we review the relevant background related to blockchain technology. Specifically, we review the characteristics and types of blockchain technology applications and platforms. We then briefly review the existing blockchain technology based applications in the finance and real estate sectors. Next, we introduce our contribution which is the blockchain-based Smart Contract Registry application type. After briefly describing the general application, we review the design decisions which would be common to most implementations of the idea. We then introduce two use cases for Smart Contract Registries in finance and real estate contexts. These applications are the Derivatives Contract Registry and the Pre-construction Contract Registry. We conclude our contribution with a brief outline of other uses for Smart Contract Registries in other industries and sections, and then conclude the paper.

This is a jointly written paper with Dr. Atefah Mashatan.