What are smart contracts?

The world computer

Blockchains are designed to create a distributed, decentralized and shared digital ledger. This ledger can be used to record financial transactions (i.e., cryptocurrency). It can also be used for other purposes

Smart contract platforms use the distributed ledger to synchronize operations of a massive distributed computer. Transactions contain code to run on the "computer". Nodes store the state of the distributed computer. After a block is validated, it is executed to update state

Smart contract platforms are massively parallelized computers. However, this parallelization is not used to speed up the computers. Every node runs the same code. Parallelization maintains state synchronization