Prospects for Smart-Contracts Use in Financial Sphere

Alina Grebenkina – Junior Research fellow of the Center for the Study of Central Banks, Institute of Applied Economic Studies, Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration; Postgraduate Student, Faculty of Economics, Lomonosov Moscow State University. E-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Andrey Zubarev – Senior Research fellow of the Laboratory of Mathematical Modeling of Economic Processes, Institute of Applied Economic Studies, Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, Candidate of Economic Sciences. E-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

The paper provides an analysis of key features of smart-contracts and examines an opportunity of their use in Russian and in the world financial sector. We check for cointegration in time series of ICO volumes and cryptocurrencies value and apply case-study approach to identify successful and promising application of smart-contract technology in various projects in financial and banking sector.

Smart-contracts technology can be successfully used in financial sector to eliminate intermediaries and to decrease spatiotemporal costs, information asymmetry costs and other types of transaction costs. ICO market is a key driver of smart-contracts technology, but the lack of proper national regulation of ICO and its sensitivity to cryptocurrencies’ market conditions reduces the rate of technology expansion in the short run. Nevertheless, some significant introduction of smart-contract technology into financial sector projects can be implemented in the nearest future, on the horizon of several years, which can provide a high potential for the increase in competition, operational efficiency and diversity of projects.

Key words: smart-contracts, blockchain, ICO, financial sector.