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 andmetacoin protocols. This paper focuses primarily on Bitcoin-based services and, to a lesser degree, on public blockchains in general. © 2016 Bitfury Group Limited Without permission, anyone may use, reproduce or distribute any material in this paper for noncommercial and educational use (i.e., other than for a fee or for commercial purposes) provided that the original source and the applicable copyright notice are cited. Digital assets are a relatively recent development related to the spreading use of information technologies in the financial services. Digital asset is a floating claim of a certain service or goods ensured by the asset issuer, which is not linked to a particular account, and is governed using computer technologies and the Internet, including asset issuance, claim of ownership, and transfer. Digital assets have numerous use cases, including: • Shares and financial securities