At the laBITconf 2021 hackathon conferences held on Monday November 15 and Tuesday November 16, Solange Gueiros, blockchain developer, lecturer and professor led a panel dedicated to Smarts Contracts, also known as smart contracts. In addition to her explanations on the subject, she devoted part of her presentation to a workshop that enabled live participants and those who attended virtually to create their first Smart Contract on the Ethereum Blockchain. If you want to know how to create your first smart contract for free, we’ll explain how.
To start with the practical part, you first need to know that smart contracts are more than a transfer of virtual currency, we’re talking about doing more than Bitcoin. Solange Gueiros explained that it’s a computer program like any other, with the difference that it’s published on the Blockchain. A smart contract is a computer program that facilitates, secures, enforces and executes recorded agreements between two or more parties.
However, as it runs on the network of this technology, it cannot be modified. Once published, it operates autonomously. What’s more, it has no intermediaries and is decentralized. This is what Gueiros said at the BITconf 2021 conference, adding that the data circulating in it is immutable.
What’s immutable about the smart contract?
That is, it can’t be changed, and the code can’t be corrected. However, the panelist pointed out that there can be room for some modifications, as long as the smart contract has been designed for this: “it can have a function that modifies this information, previously programmed,” she said. He also pointed out that all these transactions carried out are recorded on the Blockchain, making it possible (if necessary) to search through the history of all the changes made to the contract and bring them to light. This also acts as an audit.
The main aim of these smart contracts is to enable two anonymous parties to trade and do business with each other, without the need for an intermediary and without trust in the other contracting party being a key element in the decision to enter into the contract.
Smart contracts on Ethereum
More specifically, Solange Gueiros spoke atBITconf 2021 about smart contracts running on the Ethereum network and explained this during her presentation for beginners, pointing out that Ethereum is one of the most famous projects in the smart contract sector. It is a distributed computing platform based on a public blockchain like bitcoin, which also enables P2P smart contracts (between nodes, without a central server) to be executed in a decentralized virtual machine called the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).
Moving on to the practical part, he invited participants to open their laptops and follow a series of recommendations and steps to execute a smart contract that, for many, was their first. Here’s the step-by-step.
