What are Time-Locked Smart Contracts? - Web3 Oversimplified

If you're reading this, you may have heard about Time-Lock smart contracts or interacted with a dApp that has time locking capabilities.

A Time-Locked smart contract is a program that sits on a blockchain and is programmed to execute at a particular time or time frame.

Time-Locked contracts usually have a time limit or a time frame that has been set inside the contract, which makes it possible to delay the execution until a time limit is met.

In this article, we will be using solidity to create a sample working time-locked smart contract.

The code sample above describes how to create a simple Time-Locked smart contract. But obviously, there is more to Time-locked smart contracts than just this.

There are quite a few use cases for Time-Locked smart contracts. A few notable include:

Investments: You can lock up funds for a specified amount of time so that no one can withdraw the funds until the end of the investment period.

Scheduled Payments: You can break down payments into schedules and settle parties when the scheduled time has arrived.

Service Delivery: You can lock up funds just for the sake of service delivery. For example, you can implement a 30-day money-back guarantee using a Time-Locked functionality.

Let's take a look at the same NFT smart contract code that has a Time-Locked functionality.

The NFT smart contract above has a mintNFT function that lets a user mint and NFT from Showwcase. However, this same contract has another function that lets the user get a refund only if the user has not held the NFT for a period of 30 days.

Lastly, the contract also prevents the contract owner from withdrawing funds for a period of 30 days. This makes the system trustless and creates transparency between the buyer and the seller of the NFT.

Thanks for reading!

I hope that the explanation above will guide you to writing fantastic smart contracts with Time-Locked functionality!