What is Ricardian Fabric?

A tool for the deployment of containers of information and an agreement protocol.

What? Let’s quickly see where the tech comes from.

Unique ideas need unique circumstances and that is what Ian Grigg was in, in the 90’s when he was issuing bonds on a payment system. Way ahead of his time, he coined the term Ricardian contract which serves as the base technology for Ricardian Fabric. Respect is given where it’s due.

The Ricardian contract represents a legal document that can be linked securely to other systems. The permanence Arweave provides makes them an excellent pair.

So what is the agreement protocol? When a website is deployed on Arweave, because of permanence, it becomes a protocol. Third parties can build on top of it without worrying that things break or change. The agreement protocol is a permanent website containing a Ricardian Contract that can be accepted and signed with an Arweave wallet and the result of this is a proof of a signed agreement on Arweave.

The agreement protocol contains the terms and conditions and deploys permanent proofs on Arweave.

The creator of the Agreement protocol is called the Issuer and the wallet accepting the agreement is the Participant. It’s actually pretty simple.

Let’s see that in practice!

You can find the MVP hosted here

What is that link? The deployment tool. You are able to type the terms of your agreement and set some options, set who can sign it, expiry date or if you want to capture the event of signing with a backend or redirect to a website.
This is useful if you wanna know who signed your agreement, you can capture the transaction id.

There are no extra fees in this version, only the network fee which is minuscule. Pay once, store forever.

Check out this simple agreement I just created here. Do you agree with this?
Are you reading this in 2100? The link should still work. :)

What happens if you accept it? You can see here. This link provides the proof an agreement took place.

Isn’t it awesome? This is only the beginning. The foundation for something more. In the next article, I will explain the intersection of Ricardian Contracts and Smart contracts and how the two can work together.

Visit ricardianfabric.com to find the latest link to the DApp and connect with me.