PeerAssets offers the framework that enables communities and organizations to issue and transact with blockchain assets.
PeerAssets is a Peercoin in-house developed blockchain token protocol. At the time of writing PeerAssets is tailored to work with the Peercoin blockchain, however there are plans to port the technology to other blockchains like Bitcoin and allow for cross-chain compatibility. PeerAssets is as minimalist as possible, seeking to find the most efficient and affordable method for a blockchain to support tokenization. PeerAssets transactions are standard Peercoin transactions, relayed by the standard nodes and processed by miners as any other transaction. Unlike many similar protocols (Omni, CounterParty), PeerAssets does not use so called "auxilary" tokens (Omni and XCP respectively), it only uses blockchain's native currency which is used to pay transaction fees. PeerAssets protocol does not require hard nor soft fork of the host network, but it requires development of a PeerAssets aware client. PeerAssets is also inspired by the original idea of "Colored Coins" and uses OP_RETURN to write data on the blockchain, but offers some optimizations to reduce amount of data written in the OP_RETURN and reducing blockchain bloat. PeerAssets enables easy querying of the blockchain for relevant transactions via the use P2TH, which allows development of very light clients and does not mandate the use of resource intense blockchain-parsing nodes which are common with competing protocols.
PeerAsset protocol based assets can be utilized to represent any type of asset like bonds or equity. PeerAssets can also represent real life objects, and by doing so confirm their existence on the blockchain.
PeerAssets was invented in 2016, and the whitepaper was released in April, 2016 by peerchemist.
PeerAssets uses a somewhat different phrasing to describe the protocol and it's interactions. In PeerAssets terminology assets are named “decks” and each transaction on the deck is called a “card”. Decks and cards are types of transactions parsed by the PeerAsset client to understand the bigger picture and calculate the cards balances and thus the state of the deck.
Deck - asset
Card - individual token
PeerAssets protocol has four elemental transaction types:
- Deck spawning transaction
Creates a new token at a given Peercoin address. Asset is described by:
- token name,
- descriptive metadata,
- how divisible the token is (number of decimals),
- the deck issue mode.
Deck issue modes can be understood as light smart contracts, speaking in modern crypto jargon as they allow great flexibility when defining rules of token supply.
- Card issue transaction
Creates new tokens of deck at given Peercoin address.
- Card burn transaction
Destroys tokens and removes them from the supply.
- Card transfer transaction
Standard p2p token transaction, transfer a token from the address where they reside to a new address.
This command line program is useful as companion utility during PeerAssets development and testing. It is built for console usage via intuitive and easy to learn set of commands. It stores the privkey in OS's native keystore, which is automatically unlocked upon logging into active user session.
github: https://github.com/PeerAssets/pacli
Official Python implementation of the PeerAssets protocol.
github: https://github.com/PeerAssets/pypeerassets
PeerAssets API provider, implemented using pypeerassets.
github: https://github.com/PeerAssets/papi
deployed: https://papi.peercoin.net/api/v1/decks
(work in progress)
A light, cross-platform Peercoin wallet with baked-in support for the PeerAssets.
code: https://github.com/peerassets/chizukeki
deployed: https://peerassets.github.io/chizukeki/
The PeerAssets project has adopted RFC schema of sharing new ideas and establishing standards like the Peercoin project. RFC's are submitted on the PeerAssets github repo and peer-reviewed, after which code experimentation and final implementation proceeds.
There is a number of interesting RFC which are currently discussed, such as:
PeerAssets Alias/Proof-of-identity protocol specification
Extension of PeerAssets protocol specifies using singlet PeerAsset deck to alias the Peercoin address with any UTF-8 string with added secondary functionality of using descriptive information contained in the PeerAssets token to allow proof-of-identity verification of the privkey owner.
PeerAssets on-chain voting protocol specification
PeerAssets on-chain voting protocol. Aim is to deliver a standardized way to organize and operate peer-to-peer voting and opinion polls in fully decentralized and trustless fashion. Both vote and poll initialization and counting must be done in completely decentralized and trustless fashion without dependency on 3rd party services.
PeerAssets Data Audit Protocol
The primary purpose of this protocol is to record cryptographic hashes of successive revisions of single-file documents in a public blockchain, in a manner which enables thin clients to easily query and verify document histories. Such histories inherit useful properties from the underlying blockchain, namely immutability and massive replication, and can therefore serve as proofs of existence.