Educational Byte: How to Use Smart Contracts Without Coding?

Smart contracts leverage distributed ledger technology (DLT) to automate and secure transactions, offering numerous benefits to final users. They are self-executing digital agreements with the terms directly written into lines of code. These contracts are stored and executed on a decentralized network, ensuring transparency, immutability, and security.

They eliminate the need for intermediaries, such as banks or lawyers, reducing costs and enhancing efficiency. Traditional contracts are vulnerable to fraud and breaches due to their reliance on trust in counterparties. Smart contracts, on the other hand, leverage cryptographic algorithms and decentralized consensus mechanisms to provide enhanced security. The distributed nature of DLT networks makes them highly resistant to hacking and data manipulation.

However, the mere concept may sound intimidating to those without programming knowledge —that is, most people. There’s good news about that, though: you don’t need to code to be capable of using smart contracts for a wide range of applications. You can even create your own customized smart contracts without programming knowledge in user-friendly platforms like Obyte.

What can smart contracts do for average users?

A lot of things, actually. You probably wouldn’t even know that you’re using smart contracts. Final users can interact with existing contracts without needing to create their own. These contracts can be accessed through decentralized applications (DApps) that provide user-friendly interfaces for numerous DLT-based services.

Users can participate in token sales, decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols, games, NFT marketplaces, payment channels, donations, decentralized social media, prediction markets, and much more by simply connecting their wallets to the preferred platform and following the instructions provided.

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According to DappRadar, there are around 14,290 Dapps available for any user worldwide. They’re within 51 ledgers, built with 382,200 smart contracts, and divided into at least nine categories (games, DeFi, collectibles, marketplaces, exchanges, social, high risk, gambling, and others). Ultimately, it’s just about users with connected devices engaging in friendly apps for mobile or desktop systems.

Beyond this, you can also make your own smart contracts and be sure that the other party fulfills their part of the deal. Again, without coding.

Smart contracts in Obyte + ArbStore

When creating a smart contract with someone else, you agree to lock your funds inside the contract shared between your Obyte wallets until the established terms are met by the other party. After downloading and backing up the wallet, you should connect with the other party through the encrypted chat in the Obyte wallet. The users need to be in the “Contacts” list of each other, so the next step is to “Add a new device” and send or accept an invitation to connect.

Once done, you can start a chat to discuss the contract conditions and exchange your Obyte addresses. By clicking on the other’s address (Alice’s, for example), you’ll have the option to offer a smart contract (see the second screenshot below). If the result of some real-world event (like an asset price) is required to complete the agreement, then you should type a selected oracle address (a data feed) from the list available on Obyte.

When no such oracle exists, another option is, instead of selecting a simple smart contract, offering a contract with arbitration. The process is almost the same, but with an important addition: both parties must agree to pick an expert (human) arbiter from the ArbStore and include this arbiter’s Obyte address when writing the contract. The funds will be locked until the conditions are met. In case of a dispute, the offended party can call the arbiter and provide evidence to solve the issue. In the end, only the arbiter will be able to release the funds to the winning party.

As you can see, smart contracts are no longer limited to developers and coding experts. User-friendly platforms like Obyte and the ArbStore have made it possible for final users without coding skills to create and interact with these useful tools. With the democratization of smart contract usage, final users have the opportunity to participate in a decentralized future and unlock the potential of secure digital transactions.

Featured Image by vectorjuice / Freepik