Estonian Startup Combines AI, Blockchain and Legal Technology

Agrello’s Chief Scientist, Alex Norta, has spent 16 years researching digital contracting and smart contract technology. He is pouring the information he gained from this experience into Agrello, an agent-powered interface allowing users to build smart contract-based legal agreements on blockchain technologies. “No coding or legal skills required,” the project markets.

The Agrello platform wants to create an ecosystem or marketplace where individuals can create and obtain legal templates to create their own smart contracts. As the native token in this framework, DELTA will allow users to access and purchase templates, as well as earn money from designing them. 

DELTA, which launches July 16, is compatible with the Ethereum ERC20 standard, allowing Ethereum contracts and wallets to work with the Arello protocol. “The DELTA token acts as a secure and verifiable value transfer, to secure deposits in different currencies and across different blockchain protocols,” stated Agrello on its blog. The Agrello platform is a well-thought out effort to bring blockchain to the legal industry by streamlining legal activities like rental agreements, car sales and – eventually – other types of contracts.

“With this technology, it is possible to process a lot of logistics through our technology, which gives information about contract execution and dates for resolution and dispute resolution. And it’s possible to integrate this with devices for automated execution and so on,” explains Agrello Chief Executive Officer Hando Rand. “But, when those executions happen, then the technology can go through and host the logics. In many cases it might end up in this human perception of what to decide, what would be the verdict. And then the social technical approach must be taken that there is this artificial assistance to go through, a logic of dispute. Then we also get this human side to make the final verdict. Always with contracts and private relationships on Agrello, parties can also decide who the arbitrators would be, who the parties trust.”

DELTA is designed to facilitate interactions between parties over the platform, and the protocol creates off-chain contract storage. Private keys are under sole control of contract parties. Agrello envisages the token will allow value to flow between the on-chain and off-chain aspects of the legal-tech protocol, create a network effect, and encourage a vibrant community.

“We have a community pool, which is meant for incentivizing different parts of the community to provide more value for development of this project,” said Mr. Rand in an AMA held Friday with the project. “The main focus, of course, is in template creation. But there are other economic incentives we have with the token. The token is kind of an arbitrage. It’s an internal value vehicle. It’s basically the office system. We can build other payment methods onto the external layer that can pay in euros, dollars or whatever.” Agrello, based in Estonia, is one of the first projects to bring blockchain and crypto-token technology into the legal tech sector.

“The idea behind Agrello is to take the tedious work away from users, and let users and organizations collaborate in a peer-to-peer fashion, and allow them to focus on more decision making and creative work,” said Agrello Chief Scientist Alex Norta the two hour AMA. “And really all the repetitive, annoying work is offloaded to the smart contract and agents. And thereby you take care of the information and value transfer logistics that are involved. Value transfer logistics can very quickly explode in terms of cost and time needed. So, if you lock that off into a smart contract, you are definitely saving a lot.”

This Max Keiser exclusive article was written by Justin O’Connell, a financial technology researcher focusing on blockchain. He founded the companies Gold Silver Bitcoin and Cryptographic Asset, as well as helped to launch the largest Bitcoin ATM software provider in the world. His work has appeared in Bitcoin Magazine, Coin Desk, Crypto Coins News, Hacked, Merry Jane, NASDAQ and VICE.