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Ecosystem Authority

The ecosystem is consisted of several parties offering and requesting goods and services.
Each party can have one or multiple roles.

Party vs Person vs Participant

A party is not limited to be a legal or natural person/participant. It can also be a workload, ie a running application/program.

Example of workload identity management: SPIFFE/SPIRE

Authority

The role of the ecosystem authority is to define, operationalise and monitor the rules of the ecosystem.

How to identity the authority ?

Look for the parties defining the ecosystem onboarding rules. If there is no onboarding rule, identity the parties accountable for the litigations.

Warning: the parties defining the rules are not necessarly the ones enforcing them.

Provider and Consumer

The Provider and Consumer roles constitute the basics of the ecosystem.

flowchart LR
    provider(Provider)
    consumer(Consumer)

    provider -- offers to --> consumer
    consumer -- requests to --> provider

The output of the negotiation between a provider and a consumer is a contract governed by four principles:

  • freedom of contract
  • binding force
  • the absence of formalities
  • contractual fairness

The provider and consumer are the contracting parties.

Extra reading

Contract Law, A Comparative Introduction

Contract Law: A Comparative Introduction - 3rd edition
Jan M. Smits, Professor of Private Law, Faculty of Law, Maastricht University, the Netherlands

Smart contracts and the digital single market through the lens of a “law + technology” approach

European Commission, Directorate-General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology, Schrepel, T., Smart contracts and the digital single market through the lens of a “law + technology” approach, Publications Office of the European Union, 2021, https://data.europa.eu/doi/10.2759/562748