A webinar for smart contract developers working on the Ethereum platform has been organised by Russian startup BlockNotary. The event took place in advance of the Ethereum Russia 2016 conference.

The company founder Igor Barinov started the session with a remark that there is still no commonly accepted definition of a smart contract. Definitions vary from the most basic such as “a digitalised form of a paper contract”, first proposed by Nick Szabo in 1994, to much more complex ones.

Speaking about how blockchain and smart contracts are going to influence banks’ operation, Barinov referred to the recent prognosis issued by Morgan Stanley investment bank, which assumes that the integration of blockchain in one way or another into the business processes of all banks will happen within 5-10 years’ period of time. Meanwhile, in 2016-18 blockchain is likely to be mostly used for relatively small purposes and to be integrated into the existing schemes rather than rearrange them completely. One of those use cases can be the development of KYC solutions.

Barinov explained in detail some basic principles of how the Ethereum platform works, in particular, the principle of its digital fuel “gas”. He quoted recent achievements of his team, which has won the Consensus Hackathon 2016 award for the best Ethereum-based project. The project – Proof of Phone – enables users to connect their phone numbers with Ethereum wallet addresses.

Overall, 70 blockchain enthusiasts and professionals have taken part in the webinar. BlockNotary plans to the second session that will be dedicated to the principles of work with the Solidity language. Today’s event is associated with the Ethereum Russia 2016 conference, which will take place on 16 May 2016 in Skolkovo, a high-tech business area near Moscow. Vitalik Buterin, who has never spoken to the Russian blockchain community directly, is announced to be one of the conference speakers.

Earlier BlockNotary developed an application allowing customer identification via recorded video interviews on the blockchain. In January 2016, one of the leading Russian mobile payments platform Pay-Me announced its integration of BlockNotary solutions to facilitate interview process for its clients.

In March 2016, the largest fintech accelerator Plug and Play integrated BlockNotary together with 4 other blockchain startups into its third development programme.

Anna Lavinskaya