Assets
Assets as Values in MOI
An Asset in MOI is simply an exchangeable digital asset that is managed and recognized natively by the MOI Protocol. Unlike other blockchain protocols, all Assets in MOI are directly owned and managed by participants in their accounts.
Retrieving the balances of a participant will return in composite object with all Assets held in that account indexed by their Asset ID, which is a unique identifier for the Asset.
Creating a new Asset in MOI can be done with AssetCreate interaction with just a few lines of code instead of
requiring a complex smart contract. This largely improves the security of native assets because a large majority of
their rule sets are managed by the protocol itself.
From a scalability or performance aspect, Assets in MOI are superior, as participants looking to exchange them need not rely on a central registry contract to facilitate the transfer, making them truly peer-to-peer and interactive.
Assets in MOI are also Multi-Dimensional and can be used to represent different types of value specific to the way it will be leveraged to transact value between participants. For example, a Time Token can be used to pay for time-based transactions or for time-gated access control on a resource.
The Asset ID Standard
The Asset ID is a unique identifier for an Asset in MOI. It is represented as a hex string like
0x00000000b8fe9f7f6255a6fa08f668ab632a8d081ad87983c77cd274e48ce450f0b349fd. For more information, refer
to the Asset ID Standard.
Native Assets vs Legacy Assets
All Assets in MOI are considered native because of the protocol’s ability to recognize them uniquely and manage their balances at the participant’s level. There is no need to rely upon a smart contract or Logic to manage the core capabilities of transferring value.
This participant-level management of Assets also allows for hyper concurrency, as holders of the Asset don’t have to rely on a central registry such as an ERC20 contract to facilitate the transfer, instead directly relying on the protocol’s Asset framework which is capable of recognizing and transferring all registered Assets in the system.
Legacy assets refer to tokens that are managed using a contract and are simply a ledger of all Asset movements but only understandable within the scope of that contract’s state. The asset does not exist at the protocol level and is only a set of arbitrary state data on the contract’s address. While Legacy Assets can exist in MOI by using its Logic framework to develop something similar to an ERC20 contract, this is not a recommended paradigm for implementing Assets, due to loss of concurrency and bottlenecking at the contract level.
Admin capabilities such as modulating the supply of an Asset are usually facilitated by contract-side validation for Legacy Assets, but in MOI, the owner of the Asset is the only one capable of signing Interactions to adjust the supply.
Naturally, Assets sometimes require custom logic for managing transfer rules and other capabilities, this will be supported using Asset Logics, a special class of Logic objects in the protocol, which is directly associated with the Asset and deployed on the Asset account along with it. This Asset Logic can be used to regulate the rules of transfer and validate changes to the Asset.
TDU & The Dimension of an Asset
A multidimensional value system plays a major role in transforming existing digital Transactions into Interactions bearing multiple information vectors and value transfers. This allows participants to discover whole new ways to exchange values that are mutually agreed upon.
The MOI protocol provides the ability to create, persist and manage all assets natively as multidimensional values. These values accrued by the participant over time can be represented in the form of their Total Digital Utility (TDU), a sort of net worth for their digital assets.
The currently defined dimensions for an Asset are in the table below. Note that this is not an exhaustive list and more dimensions can be defined in the future.
| Value | Dimension | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | Economic | This dimension refers to the token's face value, which may be used for rewards, trading, and financial record keeping. |
| 1 | Privilege | This dimension represents the rights granted by the token, such as voting, access, identity confirmation, and governance. |
| 2 | Time | This dimension encapsulates the ability of the token to increase, decrease, or even expire over time. |
| 3 | Social | This dimension embodies shared societal values including affinity, vanity, exclusivity, affiliation, and communication. |
| 4 | Barter | This dimension indicates the perceived market value of the token. |
| 5 | Emotion | This dimension conveys the emotional value attached to the token, ranging from likes to dislikes and various other feelings. |
| 6 | Possession | This dimension allows for the establishment and traceability of past, present, and future ownership of the token. |
The MOI Asset Standard
The MOI Asset Standard (MAS) is a format for standardizing Asset capability. An Asset can only have a single standard, and it determines whether certain actions can be performed on the Asset. Currently, only 2 standards are supported, MAS0 and MAS1.
MAS0: Fungible Assets
Assets of the standard 0 (MAS0) are transferable and fungible assets that support all the Asset Interaction types, which means they can be created, transferred, minted and burned. There is always a supply associated with them and support modulation of that supply, i.e., the owner of the Asset can mint and burn tokens to fluctuate the total supply.
Note: Use the MAS0 standard when creating a new Asset with AssetCreate for cryptocurrency
or ERC20-like capabilities.
MAS1: Non-Fungible Assets
Assets of standard 1 (MAS1) are transferable and non-fungible assets that only support AssetCreate and
AssetTransfer. They do not have a supply associated with them and exist in solitary as a single token and
thus do not support supply modulation.
Note: Use the MAS1 standard when creating a new Asset with AssetCreate for NFT
or ERC721-like capabilities.
Managing the Supply of an Asset
To modify the supply of an existing asset, the standard associated with that Asset must support supply modulation. Currently, this capability is only supported by the MAS0 standard.
Supply modulation involves either minting tokens (creating new supply) or burning them (destroying existing supply).
These actions are performed using the AssetMint and AssetBurn interactions and can only be performed by the
current owner of the Asset.
When a new supply of an Asset is created, it is credited to the balance of the owner and similarly, when an existing supply is destroyed, it is debited from the balance of the owner.
Future Asset Capabilities
Assets in MOI are flexible entities but their current capabilities are only the tip of the iceberg. Some of the planned capabilities for Assets include the following
- Logics deployed along with an Asset called Asset Logics to regulate transfer rules and manage permissions for other capabilities.
- More Asset Standard variations to support more use cases
- Support for native management of Asset Approvals and Lockups
- Support for managing Assets as a resource in PISA