Digital Assets on Public Blockchains

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. This paper outlines basic components of blockchain-based asset ledgers,as well as their use cases for financial services and for emerging Internet of Things and consumer-to-consumer markets. We describe existing and prospective deployment models for asset ledgers,including multi-asset blockchains,colored coin and metacoin protocols. This paper focuses primarily on Bitcoin-based services and,to a lesser degree,on public blockchains in general.