# kaal:position:2026-08-08-056

**Affirmed position.** Do Smart Contracts Incur Higher Transaction Costs than Traditional Contracts? argues that adapting institutional arrangements can cause smart contracts to incur higher transaction costs than traditional contracts. This directly challenges Kaal's proposition that smart contracting removes almost all transaction costs. The abstract frames the result as a possibility grounded in transaction-cost economics and does not provide an empirical cost estimate.

**Status.** affirmed  **Published.** 2026-08-08

**Holds when.**

- The response is limited to the retrieved source proposition and mapped Kaal claim unless fuller source review supports a broader conclusion.
- External evidence level: abstract indexed.
- Mapping review tier: substantively reviewed abstract-level contradiction.
- Primary mapping confidence: 0.62.
- The primary mapping cleared the automated ambiguity test; substantive scope remains review-bound.
- Evidence is limited to an exact proposition in a Crossref-indexed abstract; full text was not reviewed.
- No relationship is treated as external endorsement, citation, causation, or validation of a broader Kaal claim.
- The source states that smart contracts may incur higher transaction costs than traditional contracts because institutional arrangements must adapt. This directly challenges Kaal's near-zero-transaction-cost proposition, while remaining a theoretical possibility claim rather than an empirical estimate.

**Current debate.** Do Smart Contracts Incur Higher Transaction Costs than Traditional Contracts?: https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4491727

**Extends.** kaal:claim:3405401-006: https://wulfkaal.github.io/claims/3405401-006

**Scholarly basis.** Wulf A. Kaal, Decentralized Commerce – A Primer on Why Decentralized Reputation Verification Systems Are Needed (2019). SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3405401

**Source PDF sha256.** `bc2d6f0ddc0852fb4085c4543c7c1dec19aaf8745eb67e3acc637e552bd7fb7d`

**Evidence level.** abstract indexed

**Mapping review tier.** substantively reviewed abstract-level contradiction

**Mapping confidence.** 0.62  **Mapping ambiguous.** false

**Topics.** smart-contracts, economics, historical-response, scholarly-literature, crossref

**Provenance.** Affirmed in kaal-review:2026-08-08:continuous-crossref-0010-reviewed-v1 at https://kaal-signal-desk.wulf577462.chatgpt.site/#review.

**Record type.** This is a dated commentary position that extends a scholarly corpus claim. It is not a verbatim claim extracted from the paper.

**Canonical form.** This markdown file is the canonical hashed representation of the position.