In a bid to formalize infrastructure and protocol, smart contract consortium group the Accord Project will partner with digital identity group Open Identity Exchange (OIX) to establish a set of open standards for smart legal contracts and digital identity.

The two groups will also work together in developing code to enable their proposed smart contract standards. The Decentralized Identity Foundation, Sovrin Foundation and Trusted IoT Alliance have also committed to work with the two groups on the creation, development and support of these standards and accompanying open source code.

The Accord Project, spearheaded by internet of things-enabled contract startup Clause, launched in 2017 to set out legal and commercial standards for smart contracts—essentially computerized contractual language that can execute a contract in real time—that would encourage broader industry adoption. The consortium includes membership from the International Association for Contract & Commercial Management, open source blockchain group Hyperledger and project management platform Clio.

OIX was founded as a nonprofit corporation in 2010 following a U.S. federal effort to examine potential digital trust frameworks to help citizens interact online with U.S. federal agencies. OIX promotes use of digital identity services based on open standards, and has been certified by the U.S. and U.K. governments, as well as digital platforms like Google, PayPal and Microsoft.

Houman Shadab, co-founder of Clause, explained that digital identity standards are a core piece of smart legal contracting, as verifying and trusting the digital identities of contracting parties, data sources, assets and transactions would mean that “lawyers can build smart legal contracts with certainty.”

“The collaboration came about as we were working on the open source protocol for legal contracting and recognized very early on about the need for canonical identity standards—you need these to ensure everyone agrees on what is being referenced in contracts and that it is done consistently to create certainty,” Hunn said of the partnership.

As part of the partnership, the two groups will release a white paper, “Accord Protocol ID,” proposing an industry standard for decentralized digital identity, as well as a supporting trust framework for smart legal contracts.

Despite the work of Clause, Accord Project and others, the full potential of “smart contracts” still exists predominantly in the world of the theoretical. Although the technology to support the concept is increasingly in production, variance between these technologies, demands for specific kinds of integrations and law supporting the use of these contracts still makes use of smart contracts a fairly novel proposition.

OIX's connections to major market organizations like Google and Microsoft may help the Accord Project in developing the necessary industry buy-in to work out some of these issues.

Shadab noted that he started the Accord Project under the idea that standards could help unify some of these divergent needs and support the development of smart contracts. “The absence of such standards poses many issues because you are introducing a new 'layer' into the concept of a contract—data—and are no longer wholly based on natural language,” he explained.

Shadab added in a statement that the standards can help groups develop broader functions into smart contracting. “It is important that organizations that start using smart legal contract technology are building from an industry recognized set of standards. We need to know, canonically, how to begin to introduce data-driven functionalities into legal contracts,” he said.