The BitFury Group has recently released a white paper titled, “Digital Assets on Public Blockchains”, which discusses how digital assets can be securely stored and transferred on the bitcoin-secured public Blockchain.
“Digital asset management is one of promising applications of blockchain technology. Blockchains could provide principal disintermediation between digital asset issuers, application developers and consumers and decouple tasks related to asset management, such as issuance, transaction processing, securing users’ funds and establishing users’ identities”, the paper reads. “This paper focuses primarily on Bitcoin-based services and, to a lesser degree, on public blockchains in general”.
It further says that using blockchain infrastructure for digital asset management will enable the creation of pure digital assets. Also, digital asset management could leverage security properties of blockchains, which include impossibility of counterfeit, immutability, transparency and ease of auditing, disintermediation and ease of transfer and much more.
Digital assets secured on blockchains have the potential to be used in established financial services as well as emerging consumer-to-consumer and Internet of Things (IoT) markets. These blockchain-based digital assets could be used in various applications, including crowdfunding, charity, peer-to-peer lending, and more.
After assessing the relative merits and risks associated with various types of blockchains for asset management, the report concludes that public blockchains alone could create the ubiquitous infrastructure for the Internet of Value (IoV).
The paper concluded saying: “Public multi-asset blockchains could form the basis for the IoV — a global, ubiquitous, largely permissionless network for digital asset transfer. While the technologies for this hypothetical network are not yet mature, and the operation of the network poses unsolved regulatory and legal challenges and hurdles, blockchains could transform asset transfer in the same way the Internet transformed data transfer”.
