After countless vicissitudes, including the failure of the European Sales Law Regulation, which was meant to be a giant step in the dream of the European Civil Code, it finally seems that beyond the 2011 Consumer Rights Directive, the European Union will have a European contractual framework.

It will be a fragmented framework, consisting of the directive on contractual aspects of digital supply (DCD), currently progressing in its seventh trilogue, and the sales directive, multichannel (SD), amended from the initial sales proposal. online. The latter is currently under negotiation in the Council. In addition, the REFIT of four consumer directives with a clear contractual impact is still under negotiation. In this complicated panorama, neither of the two new directives, which fall under the competence of the area of Justice, defines the contract, limiting themselves, in general terms, to a protective vision of the contracting consumer. What a contract consists of must be left to national law, with only European law being concerned with the services and the position of the consumer. Technologically, the proposals for directives are neutral.

Both allow the contract to be concluded by electronic means -This will generally be the case in the DCD - and both also expressly allow for the consideration to be paid in cryptocurrenciestechnology-based Blockchainafter the CJEU sanctioned its equivalence to foreign currencies as early as the judgment of 22 October 2015. Indeed, while the DCD, Blockchain The use of the euro as a contractual instrument has made impressive progress since the early days of crypto-currency.

Far beyond the electronic signature, Blockchain is a Distributed Logging Technology - LDT. Distributed Ledger Technology- whose distinctive element, for our purposes, is the existence of a community of users certifying the information circulating on the blockchain to which it owes its name. Technically, in a contractual relationship between two of its components, the content of the contract (standard content with greater or lesser complexity) is shared among the certifying community, validating that the information, encrypted, has not been manipulated and remains immutable. Therefore, the key to the IT security offered is its operation by means of blocks that store the circulating information. In simple terms, each block records the sequences or information agreed. They are closed by means of a cryptographic signature seal or fingerprint (which is known as a Hash) that the next block, opens with that Hash and one's own and so on. The second relevant characteristic is that the community does not have an administrator as such, since it is essentially P2P (peer-to-peer). Nothing prevents, and it is frequent, the contracting of services with a trusted third party - outside the chain - and even an application to identify the members of the chain, within the scope of the e-IDAS Regulation or outside it. Finally, its codified logic is aimed at the automatic execution of services that can be agreed. These may consist of deliveries, payments, supplies or all of them together, with the entire contractual iteration being reflected on the blockchain, which may be relevant for services or even for embedded goodsThe contracts are not yet located in the current directives. It can be said that, insofar as they automatically perform services, they are contracts. liquids and normally constitute a clause of adherence to the preset database content (code librery). Therefore, despite the P2P mechanism, they can be identified, in general, - when they are - as contracts concluded under general contracting conditions, serialised and prearranged. In this logic, no additional consideration is relevant, other than what defines the application: a prearranged code in order to achieve automatic execution, digitally signed, irrevocable according to given instructions, where the community acts as a witness for the purpose of proof that it has existed and has not been altered. The Smart contract (o Dumb contract on the basis of its simplicity) have very relevant fields of application in certain B2B spectrums. These are those sectors in which the obligations of compliance They require the maintenance of secure databases and their regulated nature prevents large margins of freedom. Examples include energy, insurance or trade finance. In the latter, the Spanish bank BBVA is a pioneer, pointing out the usefulness of the DLT technology, due to its flexibility, as a vehicle to automate and make more secure the structure of the different contractual chains (supply, financing, exchange of assets) by using a single record for transactions involving plural information (such as receipts, shipments or logistics). In the B2C environment, it can even be an alternative system to the simplified contract where an indelible record of transactions is relevant. Thus, a Smart contract on the blockchain Ethereum for car rental integrated in the most complex application of the service, flawlessly executed.

Undoubtedly, the difficulty of the unstoppable symbiosis between technology and law forces a simplification of concepts. However, it cannot be ignored that sufficient knowledge of its operation is required when it is intended to be associated with important legitimising and evidentiary effects. Therefore, together with ODR and European e-justice processes, such as small claims, these applications, as long as they respect the substantive or formal rules of the game (such as compliance with payment, prevention and identification legislation, transparency, access to justice or consumer protection) can undoubtedly be an important tool for the development of international trade.

The European Union, aware that technological neutrality is not enough, has set up a commission for its urgent and specific study and the specification of future initiatives in the field BlockchainThe World Food Bank, for example, has demonstrated this in sectors such as finance, health, entertainment and in general those that allow direct transactions without the involvement of third parties.

Blockchain is already an effective tool to support fair trade and to achieve greater transparency in administrative and production processes. It is therefore to be welcomed.