  With technological advances and the establishment of e-commerce models,
business challenges have shifted to online platforms. The promise of embedding
self-executing and autonomous programs into blockchain technologies has
attracted increased interest and its use in niche solutions. Using qualitative
interviews, this paper sought the opinions of the eleven industry leaders
regarding smart contracts. Findings reveal that the technology is gaining
momentum in e-commerce, particularly in financial transfer, record-keeping,
real estate, and property management, insurance, mortgage, supply chain
management, data storage, authorization of credit, denaturalized intelligence,
aviation sector, shipping of products, invoice financing and other domains. The
significant benefits of widespread adoption and deployment of smart contracts
include their capability to deliver decentralization, efficacy,
cost-effectiveness, transparency, speed, autonomy, transparency, privacy, and
security, encouraging the emergence of novel business models. Albeit these
benefits that revolutionize online transactions, the technology faced
multifaceted challenges. Smart technologies are only a decade old and are not
advanced in security, transparency, cost-effectiveness, and regulatory
framework. Furthermore, organizational, and technical challenges limit their
deployment: incompatibility with legacy systems, scalability, bugs, speed, and
lack of talent and understanding regarding smart contracts. Consequently,
policymakers, developers, researchers, practitioners, and other stakeholders
need to invest effort and time to foster the technologies and address pertinent
issues to enable the global adoption of smart contracts by small and big
businesses.
