Smart Contracts vs Traditional Legal Agreements

Ethereum smart contracts execute automatically and immutably, eliminating intermediaries and reducing costs, but "code is law" proved catastrophic when bugs in The DAO and Wormhole bridge enabled $600 million+ in exploits with no legal recourse. Traditional legal agreements, by contrast, cost over $600 per contract on average for lawyer fees and take 20% longer to enforce than a smart contract execution, yet they offer 100% recovery rate through courts compared to 0% from exploited DeFi protocols.