Recent & Upcoming Talks

Payment initiation and smart contracts
In this talk Alistair Milne (Loughborough University, UK) and Ka Kei Chan (Brunel University, UK) presented their draft paper, “Payment Initiation and Transaction Costs”, exploring the choice in financial transactions between push initiation (a transfer instructed by the owner of a monetary or financial asset) and pull initiation (where the owner allows someone else, either a recipient or a third party, to initiate transfer). The distinction between pull and push is well known to practitioners but has received relatively little attention in peer reviewed literature. They will then invite discussion of a further issue, only touched on in their paper, the role of pull initiation in the execution of smart contracts (arguably central, as illustrated by the DeFi ERC-20 token standard which supports smart contracts through pull initiation by code that has been validated on the Ethereum blockchain). Their paper suggests that a key requirement for pull initiation is the provision of supporting credit and liquidity protections to protect both sender and recipient from default risks. A point they hope this discussion can address is how to identify circumstances in which these protections can be provided through code alone (as when smart contracts operate on a permissionless blockchain); and distinguish these from other circumstances where these protections require the involvement of intermediaries (hence ruling out fully decentralised smart contract implementation).