In the current state of affairs and after several attempts to implement them, it is becoming more clear to the cryptocurrency community that smart contract systems are difficult to build on top of the Bitcoin network.
YOUTUBE rL2hG_R1FuQ Codius Explained With Stefan Thomas, CTO Of Ripple Labs. Streamed live on Feb 19, 2015
Even Nick Szabo, the father of smart contracts, recently wrote: "...the limits of Bitcoin's language and its tiny memory mean it can't be used for most other fiduciary applications." The Ripple Network is not alien to these problems since it is very efficient to achieve consensus of new transactions in seconds and supports multiple assets, but it is not structured to feature smart contracts. To solve this, and maybe for all the other networks as well, Stefan Thomas, CTO of Ripple Labs, is leading a project called Codius to enable smart oracles, which include the ability to "listen" to what is happening in the "outside world" as well as hosting smart programs in multiple languages.