Don’t let your business fall behind without implementing smart contracts into your organization. Hire your next Smart Contract Developer on Upwork for a seamless and safe hiring process.
What’s So Smart About Smart Contracts?
Smart contracts may have the most potential of all blockchain applications to change how companies and organizations do business. They aren’t considered smart because they think or make decisions like a human. Instead they’re called “smart” because they automatically execute specific actions when predetermined conditions are met, without the need for manual intervention. Blockchain offers a distributed and authoritative ledger of transactions. As we explore in this article, that same technology can also create self-executing smart contracts.
What Is A Smart Contract?
According to the most restrictive definition, smart contracts are a specific type of contract created and stored on a blockchain, designed to facilitate legally binding, self-executing transactions between parties. A broader explanation? They represent any agreement between parties stored on and executed by a blockchain.
Though blockchain is a relatively recent innovation, the idea of a self-executing contract stored on a distributed ledger has been around since at least 1994. The concept itself is pretty simple: rather than relying on a middleman (i.e., a lawyer, notary, or broker) to facilitate the performance of a contract, two parties can create a self-executing digital contract stored on a shared network.
The key distinction between a smart contract and any other kind of agreement is that a smart contract doesn’t just record the terms of a deal, it also makes sure that the deal is carried out.
With smart contracts, verification happens in real-time. As the terms of the contract are met, the contract automatically transfers assets between parties, whether money, stocks, or anything else of value.
Smart Contract Development Solutions for Businesses
Automated Payments and Transactions
Smart contract developers can create systems that automatically execute payments or transactions when certain conditions are met, ensuring timely and accurate financial operations. This is particularly useful for supply chain management, royalty distributions, and automated billing.
Decentralized Finance (DEFI) Services
Smart contract developers can create DeFi applications that offer a range of financial services like lending, borrowing, and investing without the need for traditional financial intermediaries, providing businesses with alternative financing and investment options.
Tokenization of Assets
Developers can create smart contracts that represent digital ownership of physical assets through tokens. This can include real estate, art, or company shares, facilitating easier and more flexible trading and ownership transfer.
Creation of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs)
Smart contract developers can facilitate the creation of DAOs, which are fully autonomous, blockchain-based organizations governed by smart contracts. DAOs can democratize decision-making and operations for businesses or community projects.
Cost of Hiring A Smart Contract Developer
Rates can vary due to many factors, including experience and expertise, location, and market conditions.
An experienced smart contract developer may command higher fees but also work faster, have more specialized expertise, and deliver higher-quality work.
A developer who is still in the process of building a client base may price their smart contract services more competitively.
Questions To Answer Before Hiring A Smart Contract Developer
Before vetting potential candidates, it’s important to lay out your project’s requirements. Answer the following questions, and you’ll have a great starting point for hiring talent.
What expertise is required to run your project(s) efficiently?
Not all smart contract developers have the same amount of experience. If your team needs a Decentralized Finance (DeFi) platform created and implemented, with complex financial products, such as automated asset management and yield farming, you’ll need a Smart Contract Developer with a lot of experience.
What is the timeline of your project?
Let prospective blog writers know if they’ll work on short, single, or multiple projects with your team.
What skills are you looking for besides those directly related to Smart Contract Development?
Many hiring managers want more than just technical skills from smart contract developers. Adaptability, time-management, and critical thinking are all skills many clients look for in smart contract developers.
How To Hire A Smart Contract Developer
You can source smart contract developer talent on Upwork by following these three steps:
- Write a project description. You’ll want to determine your scope of work and the skills and requirements you are looking for in a smart contract developer.
- Post it on Upwork. Once you’ve written a project description, post it to Upwork. Simply follow the prompts to help you input the information you collected to scope out your project.
- Shortlist and interview blog writers. Once the proposals start coming in, create a shortlist of the professionals you want to interview.
Writing A Smart Contract Developer Job Post
Your job post is your chance to describe your project scope, budget, and talent needs. Although you don’t need a full job description as you would when hiring an employee, aim to provide enough detail for a contractor to know if they’re the right fit for the project.
Job post title
Create a simple title that describes what you’re looking for. The idea is to target the keywords your ideal candidate will likely type into a job search bar to find your project. Here are some sample Smart Contract Developer job post titles:
- We are looking for a senior smart contract engineer to join our team and support the smart contract engineering discipline
- In need of a smart contract developer to help build the blockchain infrastructure needed to bring our company’s scalability infrastructure to the Ethereum ecosystem
Project description
An effective Smart Contract Developer job post should include:
- Scope of work: List all the deliverables you’ll need from identifying and fixing bugs to conducting code reviews
- Project length: Your job post should indicate whether this is a smaller or larger project.
- Background: Be sure to mention your preferences for specific technologies, industry expertise, or software.
- Budget: Set a budget and note your preference for hourly rates vs. fixed-price contracts.
Smart Contract Developer responsibilities
Here are some sample responsibilties you could include in your own job description for a smart contract developer:
- Create, deploy, and maintain smart contracts on various blockchain platforms
- Conduct thorough testing and audits of smart contracts to identify and rectify security vulnerabilities
- Work closely with other developers, UI/UX designers, project managers, and stakeholders to integrate smart contracts into blockchain applications and systems
Smart Contract Developer requirements and qualifications
Here are some sample requirements and qualifications you could include in your own job description for a smart contract developer:
- Degree in computer science or related field
- Strong experience in writing, testing, and deploying smart contracts
- Knowledge of Solidity, Vyper, or other relevant blockchain programming languages
- Familiarity with blockchain platforms such as Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, or others
If you’re looking to integrate blockchain and smart contract development into your business, hire a smart contract developer on Upwork today.
What’s so exciting about smart contracts?
The above example is pretty simple—the real promise of smart contracts lies in more complex arrangements, like the kind of highly structured trades that take place between financial service firms, or elaborate and highly contingent supply chains that tie together dozens of suppliers and buyers. These are situations that involve lots of money, lots of people, and lots of time. Smart contracts have the potential to make these complex transactions more efficient while also increasing transparency and trustworthiness among all parties. Here’s how:
- Efficiency. Transactions take place as soon as the terms of the contract are fulfilled. Currently, it can take months for assets to be moved after a contract is signed. There’s no lengthy verification process. At a minimum, this means larger and more complex agreements will take less time to execute, allowing companies to move more quickly.
- Trustworthiness. Smart contracts are encrypted and stored on a shared blockchain that’s controlled by the parties themselves. There’s no need to trust a third party to hold assets or ensure the terms of the agreement are executed. Furthermore, it’s practically impossible for information to be lost, since the ledger is replicated in full across many different machines.
- Transparency. When the terms of a contract are expressed in computer code rather than natural language, there’s no room for ambiguity. It’s even possible to test an agreement with any number of variables so that all parties involved can know exactly what will happen under any given circumstances. This should help reduce or eliminate disputes that arise under unusual circumstances.
- Privacy. Smart contracts can have variable permission structures, meaning that regulators may be able to see the terms of the contract while protecting the identities of the parties themselves. This allows regulatory authorities to monitor for fraud and suspicious activity without violating the privacy of individuals.
Futuristic applications
We’ve laid out some pretty straightforward problems that smart contracts may be well suited to solving, but much of the excitement around them involves more futuristic scenarios.
Imagine all Internet-connected appliances on a single power grid negotiating to share electricity efficiently without requiring a central controller to assign and balance loads. It’s also possible to imagine networks of self-driving cars that know when to buy their own fuel based on mileage and fuel prices, or when to schedule their own maintenance with the local auto shop.
The exciting promise here is that these ecosystems can grow and manage themselves without requiring humans to develop and manage a centralized control system. To be clear, we’re still a ways from such a scenario (and there are very real obstacles to its implementation), but it represents one of the ways smart contracts can do more than just automate stock trading between people.
Let’s not get ahead of ourselves
A few words of caution: Blockchain is still in its early days and there are some good reasons to be cautious of it right now. For starters, blockchain and smart contracts are still in their infancy, technologically speaking. Many of the applications we’ve looked at are hypothetical or still in the proof-of-concept stage. That isn’t to say that the tech won’t get there someday, but for the moment you probably shouldn’t be restructuring your supply chain to rely solely on blockchain.
Another consideration is less technological than legal or political. For starters, blockchain or related technologies are unlikely to replace contract lawyers anytime soon. In large contracts especially, lawyers are still likely to be play a critical role at the negotiations stage.
Furthermore, it always takes governments and courts some time to catch up to the latest technological developments. Smart contracts have the potential to transform the way legal contracts are structured, implemented, and litigated about, but they’re only valuable to the extent that they’re recognized by either legislation or court rulings.
We’ve spent some time looking at what blockchain can do, but it’s also worth considering what it’s not suited to.
Blockchain has the potential to really shine when it comes to complex transactions involving quantifiable assets. These are frequently the kinds of transactions that really benefit from automation. But there are plenty of scenarios where you can’t (or wouldn’t want to) automate the process. For example, a smart contract can’t gauge whether a job was done to the buyer’s satisfaction unless the buyer explicitly tells it so, in which case, the smart contract really hasn’t simplified anything.
Furthermore, a smart contract is only as good as the code it’s written in. Poorly written contracts can lead to all kinds of unexpected and undesirable consequences, and the same properties that make it difficult to tamper with or alter a blockchain also make it very difficult to stop or rewrite a faulty contract. In this scenario, developers play a role that isn’t so different from the one lawyers play when drawing up physical contracts.
As we’ve said before, we’re still in the early days for smart contracts and blockchain more generally. The technology is immature and there are no universal standards or widely acknowledged best practices yet. But there are a number of blockchain and smart contract-related projects right now, with more springing up by the day and lots of potential as this technology moves forward.