Smart contracts may or may not be deployed on a blockchain, but it makes sense to deploy them on a blockchain due to the distributed and decentralized consensus mechanism provided by blockchain. Ethereum is an example of a blockchain platform that natively supports the development and deployment of smart contracts. Smart contracts on Ethereum blockchain are usually part of a broader application such as Decentralized Autonomous organization (DAOs).
As a comparison, in Bitcoin blockchain, the transaction timelocks such as the nLocktime field and CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY (CLTV), CHECKSEQUENCEVERIFY script operator in the Bitcoin transaction can be seen as an enabler of a simple version of a smart contract. ...
