In general, the term smart contract actually appeared more than twenty years ago. Nick Szabo, a computer scientist and cryptographer, wrote an article about smart contracts in the distant 1995. The concept proposed by Szabo is exactly what the smart contracts offer today, including the idea of implementing and storing smart contracts in a distributed ledger.
I noticed that in recent years, there have been many projects that in one way or another try to modernize smart contacts, to make working with them more comfortable and safer, this is what VestChain is engaged in.