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Accord Project ID: The Smart Legal Contract Identity and Trust Framework Standard
Accord Project ID: The Smart Legal Contract Identity and Trust Framework Standard
This white paper lays the groundwork for a standard underlying the intersection of two increasingly important phenomenon: digital identity and smart legal contracts.
Smart legal contracts, as part of the general growth of business automation and legal technology, are a growing phenomenon that connects traditional legal agreements to external sources of data, enterprise technology, and online services. Smart legal contracts may use distributed ledger technology to enhance their operations, including with respect to identity transactions. Smart legal contracts enable the full automation of business transactions and corresponding gains from higher efficiency and increasingly data-driven contractual relationships, operations, and analytics.
The connection between digital identity and smart legal contracts is that identity is a foundational aspect of legal agreements. As natively digital phenomenon, smart legal contracts must integrate into digital identity systems.
The Accord Project white paper develops the Accord Project ID (“APID”) digital identity standard for smart legal contracts. This identity standard forms a component piece of the open source Accord Project Protocol. The white paper also provides a foundation for the APID identity trust framework as an application of identity systems to smart legal contracts.