It's more akin to a compiled executable that optionally has state. The caller pays to make changes to the state. It's up to the programmer who wrote the smart contract to make it so that unwanted changes aren't performed (eg. simple if-elses to check that the caller is in a hardcoded list or ask another smart contract to validate).
Each external from outside the blockchain into the program's functions are atomic., so user wallet initials func1 which calls func2 which calls func3, no matter which smart contract func2 and func3 are in, the whole call stack is 1 atomic operation.
A token is basically a smart contract that has an associate array with the owners as the keys and the values as the balance: [alice: 1, bob: 20].
And then you can imagine how the rest like transfers, swaps etc works.
And then it's kind of a "contract" because of the atomic nature. Since X transfers $1 to Y and Y transfers 1 cat to X for it is 1 atomic transaction.
It's more akin to a compiled executable that optionally has state. The caller pays to make changes to the state. It's up to the programmer who wrote the smart contract to make it so that unwanted changes aren't performed (eg. simple if-elses to check that the caller is in a hardcoded list or ask another smart contract to validate).
Each external from outside the blockchain into the program's functions are atomic., so user wallet initials func1 which calls func2 which calls func3, no matter which smart contract func2 and func3 are in, the whole call stack is 1 atomic operation.
A token is basically a smart contract that has an associate array with the owners as the keys and the values as the balance: [alice: 1, bob: 20].
And then you can imagine how the rest like transfers, swaps etc works.
And then it's kind of a "contract" because of the atomic nature. Since X transfers $1 to Y and Y transfers 1 cat to X for it is 1 atomic transaction.