The Legal Framework of Smart Contracts in the Arabian Gulf

New tools have aided contractual transactions, particularly so-called smart contracts. Such tools have an impact on the formation of contracts and the implementation of the parties’ mutual obligations. Entities in the Arab world have generally hesitated to apply smart contract technology to high-end transactions out of fear that at some point these will not sit comfortably with existing legislation. The civil law landscape is still blurry. This article focuses on analyzing the legal framework of smart contracts in selected Arab countries and uses English smart contract regulation in order to compare how their regulation was tamed there and whether the issues are confronted by Arab users and legislators. The focus is on six case studies in countries that are considered as having the largest amount of freight transactions and hence the greatest likelihood of making use of smart contract technology. The choice of these six countries was predicated on World Bank indexes in terms of freight capacity and output, in particular the Container Port Performance Index and the Logistics Performance Index (LPI). Five of these are Gulf countries and the outlier is Morocco. The article finds that the legal systems of Gulf countries and Morocco can adopt the concept of smart contracts in principle, but legislative intervention is needed for a solely coded contract to be recognized as a ‘legal’ contract.