Before Tokens
July 24, 2017
From January, due to different reasons I had the incredible occasion to brainstorm and collaborate with some very great minds in the blockchain space.
A recurring question was: “How can we build a new cryptocurrency that offers a service?”. This gave me a lot to think about: decentralized file storage, distributed computation and more generically verifiable markets.
During the past 6 months, the word token was all over the place; as the months passed different groups worked on many of the ideas/implementations that others and I discussed - what of an exciting time to live in.
In this blogpost, I am leaving some of my notes taken during the month of January.
Dec 2016
During my Christmas vacation (Dec 2016) I started reading a Github issue that was circulating on a few chats/forum. This is the proposal for ERC20 (the proposed standard) for tokens that most (if not all) of the new tokens built on Ethereum are now using. I did not get to understand the details of the ERC20 until a month after. However, the story of tokens goes really much earlier than this, with the idea of Colored Coins.
During this month I collected the following notes on: “How to create new tokens?” without running your own blockchain.
Jan 2017
In my notes (sparse in github issues) I was writing the following categorizations, calling them “Metacoins”. Whether they are of any help today, I am not sure; friends and I found this categorization really helpful back then:
Note: off-chain, in-chain is relative to Ethereum:
- In-chain Coin (or Contract Coin)
- consensus: Ethereum nodes agree on new blocks
- transaction validation: Ethereum miners validate transactions of servicecoin during consensus step
- servicecoin fees/rewards: servicecoin miners submit their valid proof of service that can validate by the Ethereum miners.
- needs: ethereum to support verification of the proof of service
- Off-chain Coin (or Virtual Coin)
- consensus: ethereum consensus orders the servicecoin request for payment in the chain
- transaction validation: servicecoin miners read the ethereum chain and filter out transactions that are not necessary
- servicecoin fees/reward: servicecoin miners add proof of service on the chain and consider that in their transaction validation
- needs: a way to do atomic swaps across chains (e.g. spend servicecoin in eth contracts)
- problems:
- expensive proofs
- clogging the chain
- Hybrid Coin:
- evaluate ways in which we could use some basic properties of the chain: ordering, hash time lock
- evaluate off-chain (log) + backup on ethereum (state) for trade offs with efficient proofs + delegation
- Nicola Greco,
Keep on rocking the decentralized web