In the legal system, formation of a contract requires intent. If it can be demonstrated that there was no intent to form a provision of the contract, no "meeting of the minds", then I don't believe it is enforceable. (Though IANAL.)
In the legal system, formation of a contract requires intent. If it can be demonstrated that there was no intent to form a provision of the contract, no "meeting of the minds", then I don't believe it is enforceable. (Though IANAL.)
The point is that there's a pretty big publicly published document informing the world of their intent. It's called a contract, and they said "this will be the rules by which we abide."
It's a very hard battle to say "wow, I didn't intend to have my contract say that, despite writing that and publishing it." You'd have to have a lot of auxiliary material explicitly stating the opposite of what your contract actually said, or you'd have to convince others that what the contact actually says is so difficult to understand that there was no way to anticipate that the contract allows what it does. And even then, I don't know if that'd pass because "I didn't think of that at the time" is commonly not accepted as a way to get out of breach of contract.
I think you’re confusing “smart contracts” with “legal contracts”. They’re not entirely different but exploiting a loophole in a smart contract doesn’t necessarily meet the standard of a legal one.
> To form a contract, there must be: a) an offer and acceptance of said offer; b) consideration for the offer, or some value exchange; c) an intention to form legal relations; and, d) a certainty of the terms of the contract
https://www.canlii.org/en/commentary/doc/2019CanLIIDocs4082
The people who made the smart contract almost certainly wouldn’t tick all four of those boxes definitively. It’d be an interesting civil case probably!
It's actually pretty well established that a typo in a contract doesn't isn't enforceable, particularly if the party trying to enforce it is acting in bad faith.