Where to start, and what you actually need
Reading about smart contracts is one thing. Standing one up with a real counterparty (call them Company A) is another. Here is the path, followed by the concrete list of who provides what.
Where do I start?
The path from “let's explore this” to live
Seven phases, in order. Skipping ahead is how these programs stall or overreach.
Educate and align
Get executive sponsors, legal, and security aligned on why this makes sense and what a pilot needs to prove. Agree on what success looks like before picking a partner. See the executive scorecard for the trade-off you're actually signing up for.
Choose a narrow pilot
Pick one counterparty relationship, one recurring and predictable transaction type (not your highest-value or most complex deal), and one clear metric to prove out, like days-to-settlement.
Assemble named owners
Every workstream needs a named person, not a committee: security for the audit and access control, legal for contract language, finance for funding and custody, and engineering for the integration itself.
Put the fundamentals in place
Wallet and custody, legal sign-off, and an ERP integration plan need to exist before any code touches real value. The full checklist is below.
Build, audit, and test together
Deploy a vetted contract, get it audited, and test the full flow with your counterparty on a testnet (a practice network that behaves like the real one but moves no real value) before either side commits funds.
Run a bounded pilot
Cap how much value can move through the contract while confidence builds, and monitor it closely. A pilot that runs clean for a defined period is the evidence that justifies expanding it.
Expand deliberately
Raise the value cap and add counterparties in stages, not all at once. Each stage should earn the next based on what the monitoring actually showed, not a calendar date.
What you need internally
Before your team can deploy anything, these have to already be in place.
What your counterparty needs to provide
You can hand this list directly to Company A. None of it is optional.
What you agree on together
Decided jointly, before go-live, not defaulted to whichever side set up the contract.
None of this is unique to blockchain.It's the same rigor you'd apply to any new payment rail or system integration with a counterparty. The difference is that once deployed, the contract enforces itself exactly as written, so getting this list right before go-live matters more than it would with a system you can still patch after the fact.