Towards Global Asset Management in Blockchain Systems
This addresses the challenge of global asset management for users and governments on blockchain systems, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing blockchain and smart contract technologies.
The paper tackles the problem of managing non-currency assets like cars and houses on permissionless blockchains by proposing a system that unifies permissioned and permissionless blockchains, enabling asset registration and transactions through smart contracts with atomic cross-chain payments and tax collection in cryptocurrency.
Permissionless blockchains (e.g., Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc) have shown a wide success in implementing global scale peer-to-peer cryptocurrency systems. In such blockchains, new currency units are generated through the mining process and are used in addition to transaction fees to incentivize miners to maintain the blockchain. Although it is clear how currency units are generated and transacted on, it is unclear how to use the infrastructure of permissionless blockchains to manage other assets than the blockchain's currency units (e.g., cars, houses, etc). In this paper, we propose a global asset management system by unifying permissioned and permissionless blockchains. A governmental permissioned blockchain authenticates the registration of end-user assets through smart contract deployments on a permissionless blockchain. Afterwards, end-users can transact on their assets through smart contract function calls (e.g., sell a car, rent a room in a house, etc). In return, end-users get paid in currency units of the same blockchain or other blockchains through atomic cross-chain transactions and governmental offices receive taxes on these transactions in cryptocurrency units.