The Agreements Network

An open ecosystem to create, distribute, and operate legal agreements.
It’s the legal layer for a networked world.

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For Lawyers

The Agreements Network is the foundation for open legal processes that will drive exponential growth in global networks.

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For Businesses

The Agreements Network is a powerful platform for business, reducing errors, optimizing processes, and helping control risk.

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For Developers

The Agreements Network is a blockchain-based contract management platform featuring powerful smart contracts.

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Overview

The Problem

Contracts are fundamental to the global economic system, yet the way agreements are formed and monitored is slow and costly. The market is failing to be effectively served by a legal establishment geared towards the bespoke and high-value. Growing markets such as the networked economy need a way to access better legal services and tools that support the way modern commerce is evolving.

The Solution

The Agreements Network is built to enable new and more efficient forms of operating agreements via decentralised, distributed systems. It provides a technical platform enabling lawyers to productise their previously bespoke services. It uses blockchain and smart contracts technologies to provide consumers with a real-time view on their obligations. Active Agreements on the network allow businesses to visualize their risk in a compelling way.

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The Agreements Network is a prime opportunity to build a new legal layer in networked commerce, backed by the certainty of blockchain and smart contract-based evidence and processes. Lawyers with zero coding experience can combine their savvy, their clients’ needs and the Agreements Network to turn today’s legal problem into tomorrow’s market opportunity.

Read our Whitepaper to learn more about the technology and the use cases it enables.

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Use Cases

Equipment Fleet Leasing

Facilitating As-A-Service Business Models

In the evolving network economy, devices upgrade and proliferate quickly, resulting in a trend towards pay-per-use and leasing models and in deployments of fleets of equipment, for example, robotics like drones. To serve this market, agreements issues such as unit function history, ownership, payments, rights of use, maintenance and insurance may all be parameterized as workflows in the Agreements Network.

Content Creators

Earning Money While Protecting Content Rights

The internet has generated profitable new media platforms for users to create and distribute content (YouTube etc). Despite the vast opportunities there are problems for creators of unique content, for example ownership of their intellectual property, ensuring fair remuneration, and protecting against third-party copyright infringement lawsuits. The Agreements Network is a powerful tool to meet these unique challenges.

Corporate Governance

Increasing Margins through Functionality and Reproducibility

Corporate governance (the rules and processes which control a company) is traditionally a meaty revenue stream for lawyers. The first stage in this essential business process is company incorporation or organization. The Agreements Network provides value by creating a persistent record of the incorporation instrument, to anchor further smart contracts for corporate governance, thus unlocking further potential legal work.

FAQ

  • Basics of agreements

    • Why do people want to enter into agreements at all?

      • Certainty over whether an agreement was made
      • Clarity between parties about the specifics of what was agreed
      • Mutual understanding of performance obligations
      • Greater efficiency in dispute resolution
      • Enforceability means increased confidence in business decisions

    • What do people (or other autonomous entities) stand to gain by entering into an agreement digitally?

      • Computable reference objects (with the capacity to drive automation elsewhere)
      • Cryptographic proof of agreement state (by parties timestamping, signing, and ordering it amongst other documents via hash-chaining
      • Security against loss
      • Interoperability with other agreements (e.g. static, hierarchical, dynamic)
      • Tracking in real-time
      • Fulfilment logs and other event streams

  • Basics of the network

    • What is the Agreements Network architecture?

      The Agreements Network is a hybrid solution leveraging interconnected, distributed systems. The four systems at the core of the Agreements Network are:

      1. Ethereum for the operation of the Agreement Network’s token infrastructure
      2. Cosmos Hub – a Proof-of-Stake blockchain to be launched by the Cosmos Network; it uses Tendermint consensus, contains a built-in governance protocol, and serves as coordinator for interoperability between other blockchains
      3. InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) for storage of content
      4. Hyperledger Burrow’s permissioned Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) blockchain operates our Cosmos zone
      5. Open source components and smart contracts built by Monax and others.

    • What is the permissioning model of the Agreements Network?

      • The Agreements Network is a public, permissioned blockchain design, meaning that for most of the users most of the time it operates in the same way as a public unpermissioned blockchain network
      • In order to optimize the blockchain for contract management purposes, the founders have put in place a governance system around new smart contracts that are added to the blockchain
      • Because the protocol is built to be a no-code solution for almost all participants it is rarely the case that a user will need to add new smart contracts to the blockchain
      • We don’t prohibit new smart contracts being added to the chain, however, we will be leveraging the permissioning system of Hyperledger Burrow to enable anyone to propose the addition of new smart contracts to the network
      • These proposals are voted on by the Validators - if successful, then the smart contracts are added to the chain, if unsuccessful they are not

    • What is Cosmos?

      • Cosmos is a network of blockchains which facilitate sovereign and easy-to-develop blockchains to scale, and with interoperability, thus creating an Internet of Blockchains
      • The Cosmos Hub can connect to myriad zones - public or private - as long as each zone communicates via the Inter-Blockchain Communication (“IBC”) protocol. Tendermint-based zones are natively compatible with IBC, but any fast-finality consensus algorithm can be used as a replacement.
      • For more details please visit (https://cosmos.network/intro)

  • Basics of the protocol

    • I’m a lawyer, how can I make money by using the Agreements Network?

      • As an Archetype Producer to create and upload Archetypes (legal prose plus smart contract workflows) of Active Agreements
      • Archetype Producers don’t need to have coding skills
      • Archetype Producers earn a usage fee when an Active Agreement is created within the network based on their activities
      • As a Tester by providing verification of the suitability for purpose (attestation) of an Archetype uploaded to the Agreements Network
      • Testers earn fees when an Active Agreement is created within the network based on their activities

    • I’m a service provider for various ethereum systems, how can I integrate my services into the Agreements Network?

      • Connect solutions linked to the vital commercial data contained within the Agreements Network
      • Build applications that use the Agreements Network’s APIs

    • I’m a smart contract developer, how can I build things for the Agreements Network?

      • Develop features unique to the Agreements Network
      • Extend the network of capabilities on top of the Agreements Network protocol
      • Create contract templates and further contracts

  • Basics of the token economics

    • Why do you have a token?

      • A token system is used to assure the operational backbone for the Agreements Network within the proof of stake decentralized consensus mechanism
      • A tokenized system offers protection against cheating and spamming, enhancing network security

    • When is your ICO?

      We will be announcing this here soon…
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    • What does the Agreements Network token do?

      • Producers, Testers, and Validators buy tokens and place them into a bond
      • Token bonds are used extensively - they are contracts similar to machine-controlled escrow systems
      • If users act in accordance with the Network’s rules and later wish to recover their bonds, they are free to do so
      • Tokens also provide spam protection to protect the overall operation of the Network

    • When is your presale?

      We will be announcing this here soon…
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Collaborators

Working together to launch the Agreements Network are…

32 Advisors

Anthemis

BakerHostetler

Clause

Erdos IP Law

LegalBono

LexPredict

Libra

Mattereum

Monax

Partech

Rymedi

Wolfram Blockchain Labs

Transparent Node

These companies are not in a formal legal relationship of any kind.

Connect With The Ecosystem

The founders of The Agreements Network would love for you to join our growing ecosystem. Feel free to connect with us below to understand a bit more about the opportunities to join the ecosystem.