The Legal Status of Smart Contracts and Their Compliance with Written Form Requirements in Lithuanian Contract Law

Abstract

This article applies a ‘law + technology’ approach to evaluate the legal status of smart contracts in Lithuanian contract law and to determine the conditions under which agreements concluded on their basis may comply with written form requirements.
The first part reveals the concept of smart contracts, their technical and legal operating premises and possible types thereof, demonstrating that this phenomenon is not uniform. The second part of the article evaluates the legal status of smart contracts and concludes that a smart contract is not an independent type of contract but, to the contrary, that it functions as a technological mechanism for formalising and executing agreements, the validity of which must be assessed under general contract law requirements. The third part analyses the conditions under which agreements subject to the written form requirement may satisfy this requirement, examining text authenticity, immutability, as well as the confirmation of the parties’ intent and the establishment of their identity. The revised eIDAS Regulation provides a legal basis for recognising blockchain records as written documents, while a cryptographic signature may fulfil the functions of a signature provided that the digital identifier can be linked to the person’s civil identity. However, due to the lack of qualified trust service providers and the absence of case law in Lithuania, the application of these preconditions still relies on analogy rather than clear legal norms.