Smart Contracts for Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): A proposed guidance handbook

Smart Contracts, when underpinned by Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) such as blockchain, can revolutionise the world of autonomous executions of contracts within a distributed context. This will help how we address global challenges and work collaboratively towards achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). These Smart Contracts allow automation of the execution of contractual actions based on the fulfilment of the contractual conditions/criteria agreed upon/enforced by the participating agents. These participating agents persist the inputs, execution and their outcome into the DLTs/Blockchains whilst gaining its peculiar characteristics of provenance, immutability and transparency into the Smart Contracts. Collectively, the Smart Contracts within DLTs are able to achieve effective integrations of distributed processing agents, efficiency of transaction finality, autonomy and trust in various processes which all make crucial contributions to the success of SDGs within the rapidly evolving and widely distributed digital ecosystems.