The post What Are Smart Contracts? In-Depth Blockchain Guide appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

Every day, lines of code quietly execute agreements worth billions on decentralized networks worldwide. Origins and Evolution of Smart Contracts Nick Szabo’s Vision in the 1990s Long before blockchains became a household term, computer scientist Nick Szabo imagined vending-machine–style “smart” agreements that could verify and enforce the terms of a deal without external enforcement. His essays described pieces of software that would act as trusted intermediaries, reducing both costs and counter-party risk. Although the tech of the era could not yet deliver this dream, Szabo’s blueprint inspired an entire generation of cryptographers and open-source hackers, sowing the seeds for today’s programmable money revolution. Ethereum and the Birth of Programmable Money The 2015 launch of Ethereum introduced the first widely adopted execution environment—the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)—designed specifically for autonomous code running on a distributed ledger. Suddenly, developers could write tiny programs called contracts, deploy them to a global computer, and trust that every node would produce the same result. The Cambrian explosion that followed gave rise to decentralized exchanges, stablecoins, algorithmic lending, and countless experiments in tokenized ownership. The Multi-Chain Era Today’s landscape spans Bitcoin’s limited but battle-tested Script, the EVM on Ethereum mainnet and its Layer 2 rollups, MoveVM on Aptos and Sui, WebAssembly on Internet Computer and Polkadot, and purpose-built VMs such as Starknet’s Cairo. Each targets different scalability, security, or developer-experience trade-offs, yet they share a common objective: deterministic, censorship-resistant computation. [Insert Image: timeline illustrating the evolution from Szabo’s writing to modern multi-chain networks] How Smart Contracts Work Under the Hood The Transaction Lifecycle When a user submits a transaction, a node bundles it into a block proposal. Once consensus finalizes the block, every full node executes the contract code locally, updating on-chain state. Because the input data, bytecode, and virtual-machine rules are identical everywhere, each node…

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Filed under: News - @ July 9, 2025 12:23 pm