Building a trust relationship between commercial entities isn't automatable; it nearly always requires a contract to be carefully hand-written and argued over by high-priced lawyers before any meaningful exchange of value can take place.
Sure, this is an unfortunate level of friction, and overkill in many cases, but think about it from a cost/benefit perspective: I can spend $10k on legal fees and successfully avoid not just a lot of uncertainty, but very infrequently, the contract also protects me from losses that can be orders of magnitude larger than it cost me to negotiate the contract.
Sure, this is an unfortunate level of friction, and overkill in many cases, but think about it from a cost/benefit perspective: I can spend $10k on legal fees and successfully avoid not just a lot of uncertainty, but very infrequently, the contract also protects me from losses that can be orders of magnitude larger than it cost me to negotiate the contract.