Applicable Smart Contracts

By utilizing Bitcoin transactions, Open naturally inherits all the smart contract capabilities of Bitcoin and goes beyond. When transferring tokens to a counterparty, you can define additional spending conditions in the payment information that the recipient must satisfy. These additional spending conditions are not enforced by the global consensus of the blockchain but rather by the validation programs of Open nodes.

This means that if someone attempts to spend tokens without adhering to specific Open spending condition rules, the recipient's node will fail the validation, deeming the transaction non-final, and the sender will not succeed.

In fact, when an Open transaction fails, the Bitcoin transaction containing the UTXO associated with the spent tokens may still receive confirmations. This implies that the tokens will no longer belong to any UTXO, effectively considering the tokens "burned." This is a mechanism to consider when crafting Open smart contracts.

One trade-off to keep in mind is that while Open smart contracts can provide privacy and scalability beyond what other alternatives may offer, the state of these smart contracts is not globally accessible and cannot become ownerless (unowned), as is possible on other blockchains. This limitation may restrict certain use cases.

Due to the inherent nature of Open clients, various smart contract frameworks can be proposed and implemented trustlessly.