Karen E.C. Levy skriver i Book-Smart, Not Street-Smart: Blockchain-Based Smart Contracts and The Social Workings of Law at tilhengerne av smarte kontrakter har en alt for enkel forståelse av hvordan tradisjonelle kontrakter faktisk fungerer. De henger seg opp i den formelle siden av kontrakten, men overser den sosiale konteksten, som ofte er essensiell for å forstå hvordan kontrakten vil bli brukt i praksis.

Though smart contracts may serve these goals in some contexts, I suggest that we should temper our enthusiasm about the transform ation of modern contracting practice. This is because smart contract boosters tend to understand contracts chiefly as technical artifacts, rather than as social resources. Under this view, contractual agreements are bare financial transactions that can, and should, be optimized through code; term ambiguity and enforcement costs are understood as inefficiencies that plague the system of exchange. Understanding contracting practices within their broader social and relational contexts, by contrast, reveals that contracts are in fact much more than this: they “work” in a multitude of ways and accomplish a multitude of aims that are unaccounted for by the smart contract framework.