The following paper describes a simple blockchain agnostic protocol which enables peers to issue and transact with assets. A simple explanation of how the PeerAssets protocol works would be that it works by writing and reading messages on the blockchain, where messages represent assets and addresses represent peers.
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 is a light protocol, as it utilizes no extra layers over the underlying blockchain and requires no hard nor soft fork of the host network. The simplicity of its design allows PeerAssets to reduce the amount of data that needs to be written in OP_RETURN, therefore it reduces blockchain bloat.
It does not require external value tokens beside the blockchain's native currency, which is used to pay transaction fees. PeerAssets does not participate in organizing nor maintaining of the public ledger, but takes advantage of its stability and trustworthiness. PeerAssets can work on top of every cryptocurrency that is forked from Bitcoin and has kept a compatible codebase, which includes Bitcoin, Peercoin, Litecoin and alike.
Not only does PeerAssets offer important features like shareholder voting, dividend distribution and expansion and contraction of the asset supply, it provides a way for businesses and organizations to freely move their assets between different blockchains. One of the reasons crypto-assets have not been used more regularly by businesses and organizations is because they are unsure whether the network they ultimately choose to host their assets will still be around in the future. Things change so fast in the world of crypto and a network that once seemed promising can get replaced by a better version. Businesses and organizations don't want to fear having their assets stuck or left behind on a network abandoned by its developers. A scenario like that would be devastating to any business it happened to. Therefore, providing a solution that allows an easy way to move between PeerAsset compatible blockchains is of great importance.
You can find the PeerAssets whitepaper at:
http://peerassets.github.io/WhitePaper/(or raw here:
https://github.com/PeerAssets/WhitePaper)
Thank you for reading. Any feedback is helpful. Also of note is that I am not the author of the paper, but they will answer any questions asked in this thread.
This announcement is also posted on the Peercoin forum here...
https://www.peercointalk.org/index.php?topic=4566.0
