Author: Meng Yan, Wang Wei, Zhou Zhiqiang, all from the Institute of digital assets
Original title: What is a digital asset?
Digital assets are becoming a central topic of digital economy and digital finance. The emergence of blockchain redefines digital assets and creates huge opportunities for digital assets, but at the same time it also brings difficult challenges to its research. What exactly are digital assets? How is the digital asset on the blockchain different from the digital asset in the previous centralized system? How did these differences occur and what impact will they have? This document is dedicated to the systematic exploration and discussion of the above-mentioned related issues of digital assets.
Definition of assets
To discuss what a “digital asset” is, we must first discuss what a “asset” is. Unfortunately, there is no strict, authoritative definition of assets in the law, but there are some clearly thought-out and highly enlightening views. We choose two essences as follows:
The civil law authority Mr. Wang Zejian defines assets as:
Reference definition 1: A collection of rights with monetary value[1]
The Ministry of Finance of the People’s Republic of China defines assets as:
Reference definition 2: “Resources that are formed by the past transactions or events of an enterprise, controlled or owned by the enterprise, and expected to bring economic benefits to the enterprise.” [2]
The essence of Mr. Wang Zejian’s definition (refer to Definition 1) is to point out that assets are a “collection of rights”, that is to say, assets are a group of rights that exist exclusively at the level of human consciousness and law, and are not anything Physical objects. We must distinguish the aggregate of rights as assets from the ontological objects that derive this group of rights. This is an extremely deep insight. However, this definition also has obvious shortcomings. What is “money value”? It is vague and difficult to judge.
The definition of the Ministry of Finance (refer to Definition 2) has three outstanding highlights: 1) It is pointed out that assets are “resources that are expected to… bring economic benefits.” The focus here is on the word “expectation”, which indicates that the economics of assets are not real, and as long as they are established in the subjective judgments or even guesses in the minds of some people, they can be called assets. 2) Point out that the assets must be controlled or owned by the enterprise, and cannot be left alone. 3) Point out that the source of assets is from past “transactions or events”. The term “event” is unclear, but it is clear that assets need to be created through contractual activities such as transactions and legal resolutions. However, this definition also has two outstanding shortcomings: 1) It only discusses corporate assets, that is, legal person assets, and does not discuss natural person assets. Of course, this problem is not big, just slightly expand it. 2) Defining assets as “resources” is a really serious problem. Not only is the meaning in general and vague, but it also confuses assets as a collective of rights and the basic ontology that derives these rights.
We combine the strengths of the two reference definitions and propose the following asset definition:
Assets are a collection of rights that are formed and adjusted by transactions or other agreed actions, have clear owners or controllers, and are expected to bring economic benefits.
Regarding the above definition, the following instructions are required:
First, the asset must have expected economic benefits. Among them, “expectation” is a key point. As an asset, it is not necessary to generate positive cash flow, or even to have definite economic benefits, as long as there is an expected value of its future economic benefits at this moment greater than zero. This shows that assets are purely a subjective judgment and, in essence, a guess. From this we also have an important inference, that is, assets must have arrangements for the distribution of income . Since assets have expected returns, regardless of whether the returns are actually generated, the rules for income distribution must be arranged in advance. There can be rules without gains, and there cannot be gains without rules.
Secondly, in this definition, we adopted Mr. Wang Zejian’s view of defining assets as a collective of rights. This is of course more accurate, but it will also bring some inconvenience to use. For example, we usually say “This house is Zhang San’s property.” According to the above definition, this statement is wrong. The correct statement should be “The aggregate of ownership and control of this house is Zhang San’s asset.” But it is obviously unrealistic to force people to change their language habits in pursuit of semantic accuracy. Therefore, we can accept such a statement, but we should also make it clear that this is actually a lazy and simplified statement. The essence of this asset is a collection of ownership and control rights derived from the basic ontology. This is an important question that helps us understand assets.
Third, this definition requires a clear owner or controller, that is to say, a subject that determines the arrangement and disposal of assets. Among these, “clearness” is a key requirement, and its meaning is that for any asset, there must be a certain subject to control its ownership or control. A subject is either the controller of the asset or not, and there is no ambiguity. . In addition, there is an important inference that the state of assets is changeable and controllable . Because if the state of the asset is unchangeable and uncontrollable, then the so-called owners and controllers are meaningless.
Fourth, the creation and adjustment of assets are realized through transactions or other agreed actions. This explains the source of the asset and also the way the owner or controller controls and changes the state of the asset. Transaction is easier to understand, so how to understand “agreement behavior”? The agreement here includes private agreements, laws and regulations, organization charters, ethnic customs and even general consensus. In short, the adjustment of the state of assets always needs to be carried out in a clear procedure and protected or even confirmed by external rules.
Fifth, assets can be symbolized or even materialized. As pointed out earlier, assets are actually a set of rights, not the basic ontology that derives this set of rights (land is not an asset, but land ownership is an asset). But this is not to say that assets are things that are invisible and intangible. Assets can be symbolized or even materialized. Currency, stocks, options, bonds, bills, land deeds, etc., are the symbolic or materialized representations of assets. They have no meaning other than representing part or all of the assets. Therefore, regarding assets, a clear distinction should be made between the basic ontology (land), the asset as a collective of rights (land ownership), and the materialized representation of the asset (land deed). This conceptual clarity is very important for the following discussion of digital assets.
We can apply the above asset definition to investigate some interesting questions.
For example, in general, land is undoubtedly a type of asset, but if two people A and B land on a new continent and face a piece of land without an owner, the two decide to determine the ownership of the land by fighting. So before the fighting, was this land an asset? According to the definition, there is no clear controller of this land at this moment, and in the future, both parties may or may not be the controllers of this land. Therefore, the unowned land is not an asset.
Is health an asset? In various fitness advertisements, the saying that “health is the most important asset in life” has become a cliché, so what is the actual situation? We can think that health can produce expected economic benefits, but is health a collection of rights? Can the health status be adjusted by transaction or agreement? It seems that the text is wrong. Therefore, health should not be considered an asset.
For another example, if someone is crazy about certain items and actively collects them, but everyone in the world thinks that these collections are worthless, then is the ownership of these collections an asset? Many people will answer no. But we can see from the definition that assets are extremely subjective. If a person subjectively anticipates that this item will have economic benefits in the future, even if no one else in the world agrees, this item is also an asset for him. To understand this, imagine that this person expects that someone else may suddenly become interested in this item in the future and buy it at a high price. It can also be considered in the opposite direction. If the item is lost, the person is willing to pay a certain amount of money in order to retrieve it. Thinking about it this way, such a collection does have the expected economic benefits, and it is indeed an asset.
Expression of assets
In the above discussion, we pointed out that an asset is a collection of a set of rights, which is very abstract, but can be expressed symbolically and materially. We also pointed out that standardized documents such as currency, securities, and land deeds are all forms of expression of assets. But if we go back to the roots, we will realize that the contract is the basic form of expression of assets, and the ticket is just a standardized contract with a higher degree of standardization.
For example, if a loan agreement signed by both parties is an asset to the creditor. This agreement does not need to be expressed in the form of a standardized ticket. It can be a handwritten white strip or a fingerprint on behalf of a signature, but as long as it meets the basic requirements of the contract, it can be protected by laws or customs and become the simplest Asset materialized expression.
This is true logically and historically.
At least five thousand years ago, in the Sumerian civilization, contracts written in words appeared [3]. In modern times, it has been fully applied in all major civilizations of the East and the West. Once the contract technology is produced, it becomes the mainstream form of expressing the ownership of rights, debt relations and other assets.
In the development of contract technology itself, there is a process from general to special, from heterogeneous to homogeneous, and from non-standard to standard.
Non-standard and general contracts appear first, followed by standard contracts. First, they are established by convention, and then the basic format (schema), metadata (metadata) and rule framework of the contract are regulated in a way of laws, regulations or industry standards, allowing both parties to fill in some Customized content greatly improves the efficiency of contract formulation, reduces transaction friction, and creates conditions for contract circulation through endorsement.
A ticket is a special standardized contract. The outstanding feature of the ticket is its short length, which can often be printed on a page or even a small piece of paper. This does not mean that the contract terms of the ticket must be short, but more importantly, because the ticket is more standardized and condenses a broader consensus, so many terms related to the use of the ticket do not have to be printed on the ticket, but Placed outside the ticket, it is customary, or there is a clear specification. For example, the country has special legal provisions to regulate invoices, checks, promissory notes, money orders, promissory notes, pawn drafts and other documents, as well as documents such as ID cards, household registrations, and academic certificates. Very concise.
Securities are a special kind of ticket. It is usually an anonymous, standardized and homogeneous ticket, so it has lower barriers to understanding and transaction friction, which means it has good liquidity. However, the most important significance of securities lies in their absolute fungible characteristics, that is to say, the essence of any two units of the same type of securities is exactly the same and can be indistinguishable. Because of this characteristic, securities simplify the abstract asset rights it expresses into one-dimensional objects, and degrade the complex balance of interests into quantitative relationship operations, so that mathematics, the most powerful tool, can be introduced into the asset world. Its significance cannot be overemphasized.
Finally, currency is just a special kind of security, a standardized contract with the greatest degree of freedom, consensus, and homogeneity. Its most important feature is that the government acts as one party to the contract and forces all citizens to unconditionally accept it as the other party. contract. The earliest paper banknotes in China, such as the Northern Song Dynasty Jiaozi and Yuanmingbao Banknotes, have clearly written contract terms on paper.
Figure 1. Jiaozi of the Northern Song Dynasty
Figure 2. Mingbao Banknotes
On the US dollar banknotes, the terms are simplified to one sentence:
“THIS NOTE IS LEGAL TENDER FOR ALL DEBTS, PUBLIC AND PRIVATE” (The promissory note is the legal repayment of all public and private debts)
Figure 3. “Contract terms” on US dollar banknotes
The discussion about currency is always full of heated arguments. We do not intend to get involved in the debate about the substance of currency and the origin of currency, nor does it imply that currency has really evolved from the contract in history. In fact, the historical development of the two is intertwined, and it may not be possible to discuss the sequence. Monetary scholar Zhou Ziheng once argued that currency was an early payment tool for balances and was used in conjunction with contracts [4]. Currency has evolved into a form of full payment, which is the result of the recent development of civilization. But now that both have developed to a highly mature stage, when we conceptually construct the entire system, we should realize that, as far as trading tools are concerned, contracts are basic and general, while currency is advanced. , Special. However, this special abstraction of currency strongly concretizes the concept of value in transactions, so it has been extremely widely used, so that our contemporary people are submerged in it every day, but are much more familiar than contracts.
The point is that we have constructed a progressive conceptual structure, that is, contracts are the most basic and general expression of assets, standardized contracts are special contracts, tickets are special standardized contracts, securities are special tickets, currency It is a special security. The relationship of the five is expressed as the following figure:
Figure 4. Five asset representations
So far we have basically completed the discussion on traditional assets and their performance techniques. Below we will focus on digital assets.
Analysis of digital assets
The current popular definition of digital assets on the Internet, all content stored in digital form can be called digital assets, so all kinds of digital documents, pictures, audio and video objects can be considered digital assets.
But according to the definition of assets in the first section of this article, assets are essentially a set of rights. Therefore, if the above definition of digital assets is accepted, then digital assets are a collection of economic rights derived from digital objects , or assets based on digital content .
However, blockchain technology redefines digital assets. One of its important applications lies in the ability to digitize asset representations from contracts to tickets and from securities to assets into smart contracts or tokens. Therefore, the block The chain can realize the digital expression of assets .
So far, most discussions on digital assets have failed to distinguish the difference between assets based on digital content and digital expression of assets. The sloppy on this issue is the key reason for people’s misunderstanding of digital assets and insufficient understanding of the importance of blockchain and tokens.
We first discuss assets based on digital content . Since an asset can essentially only be a set of rights, the digital content itself must not be an asset, and only a set of rights attached to the digital content can be called an asset. This is the same as “Land is not an asset, but land ownership is an asset.” The main difference between it and land assets is the basic ontology, one is land and the other is digital object. It can also be said that such digital assets are actually traditional assets derived from digital objects.
Note that the expression of assets based on digital content is not necessarily digital. It can also be expressed using traditional paper contracts and paper notes. For example, we use paper contracts to establish and distribute the copyright of a digital movie. The basic ontology is digital content, but the assets themselves are expressed in paper contracts. This kind of asset is actually a traditional asset, and its expression and management methods are traditional.
The digital expression of assets is discussed below .
The so-called digital expression of assets is to digitize the expression of assets in the previous section. For example, a contract originally expressed in paper and text can be expressed in a digital PDF file; the original paper boarding pass is expressed as an electronic boarding pass in a mobile wallet; the original paper stock is expressed as a CSI The electronic records in the login system; the original paper banknotes are expressed as the balance in Alipay; the original paper real estate certificates are expressed as a record in the national real estate registration database. These are all digital expressions of assets. The basic ontology of these digitally expressed assets may be non-digital things, such as houses, equity, money, etc. Of course, the basic ontology can also be digital content, such as a digital movie, a digital photo, an online novel, etc.
The difference between the two is very clear. One basic ontology is a digital object, but the asset expression may not be digital, and the other asset is expressed as a digital object, but its basic ontology may not be digital. But of course, there is an intersection between the two. If an asset’s basic ontology is digital and its expression is also digital, then it belongs to both categories.
So, when people are talking about “digital assets”, do they mean assets attached to digital content or the digital expression of assets?
We hold a clear attitude on this issue, that is, digital assets should refer to the digital expression of assets . This choice is mainly based on utilitarian considerations, because if digital assets are positioned as assets based on digital content, then it will only add a new category to traditional assets. After the emergence of blockchain technology, positioning digital assets as the digital expression of assets will open up a whole new world of digital assets, open finance and even the entire digital economy. In order to give “digital assets” a bigger stage, we suggest that digital assets should be strictly limited to the digital expression of assets, and assets based on digital content should be renamed “digital content assets”.
The door to this new world was opened with the advent of blockchain technology. Therefore, we need to re-discuss the significance of blockchain for asset expression technology.
Blockchain is a technical platform for contract digitization
There have been many different opinions on the essence of blockchain. Some people think it is a distributed ledger technology, some people define it as a distinctive data management technology, and some people define it as a smart contract platform. Two of the authors of this article (Meng Yan, Wang Wei), together with Zhongguancun Blockchain Industry Alliance Yuandao and Zhu Peijiang, proposed at the end of 2017 that the blockchain is mainly regarded as the supporting infrastructure for tokens [5]. The industry has caused extensive discussions and gained a certain degree of recognition.
The well-known economist Zhu Jiaming believes that blockchain is one of the richest and broadest technologies in human history [6], so it is difficult to generalize, and it is not eager to be comprehensive in cognition. We highly agree with this view, and believe that all the definitions and descriptions of blockchain so far may be one-sided, and they are just a glimpse. We are willing to combine new thinking on the issue of asset expression and further advance the understanding of blockchain along the idea of token. In this section, we propose to understand the blockchain from the perspective of contract support technology, and regard the blockchain as the most significant technological upgrade in the field of contract support technology after the text-paper has been used for thousands of years, and therefore it is also the expression of assets. An epoch-making major upgrade of technology.
As a technology, text-paper is likely to promote human civilization more than all other technologies combined. There are two major scenarios for the application of text-paper technology, one is to disseminate information, and the other is to support contracts. Some people may think that the contract is also a kind of information, so there is no difference between the two. But careful thinking can lead to different conclusions. It is a purpose to write text on paper, copy multiple copies, and advertise it to spread opinions and ideas. Recording the agreed matters, forming consensus and even legal provisions, and preserving evidence to facilitate future supervision and arbitration are actually another purpose. In the former use, people pursue low-cost copying, editing, and dissemination, so printing is widely used. In the latter use, people’s demands are exactly the opposite, pursuing the authenticity, non-copyability, non-tampering, non-repudiation of the contract, and fear of forgery, let alone copying and editing. Therefore, handwritten signatures and complicated Anti-counterfeiting printing technology is certified.
Understanding the difference between the text-paper application scenarios, you can immediately get a new understanding of the similarities and differences between the Internet and the blockchain: the Internet is the digital upgrade of text-paper technology in the information dissemination scenario, and the blockchain is The digital upgrade of text-paper technology in contract support scenarios is shown in the following figure:
Figure 6. Two scenarios of text-paper technology and its digital evolution
Therefore, we will block chain (one-sided) is described by the parties to jointly safeguard and support the digitization of the contract creation, validation, storage, transfer, and implementation of distributed systems for other related operations. The precursor technologies of the blockchain are contract technologies such as text contracts, signatures, standard contracts, tickets, securities, currencies, and laws. These technologies have been applied for thousands of years, and the blockchain is the most significant in this scenario in thousands of years A technical upgrade of the company. Since contracts and laws are the foundation of human institutions, blockchain will have the ability to influence all institutional arrangements.
In the previous section, we mentioned that before the blockchain, we can already express assets in a digital way. For example, use PDF documents to digitize contracts, use digital pictures to digitize tickets, use electronic points to digitize currencies, and so on. We might as well refer to these technologies collectively as traditional contract digitization technologies. Compared with traditional contract digital technology, what are the advantages of blockchain and tokens?
It can be said that compared with blockchain, traditional contract digitization technology is actually just Hu Pi scribbled “printing” the contracts and tickets originally written on paper on the screen, and does not really play the main role of the digital computable platform. Strengths and potential. On the contrary, the traditional digital contract technology has introduced some new weaknesses and even loopholes, not only can not completely replace the traditional paper contract, but also have some unexpected consequences.
First, it brings new security risks. Because digital objects are easy to copy and tamper with, and there is no natural authentication mechanism, it is easy to be copied, tampered and destroyed by unauthorized persons or hackers. For this reason, the security and reliability of the computer system must be constantly checked and enhanced. Nevertheless, security vulnerabilities in this area can be described as endless, which makes the cost and risk of traditional contract digital technology quite high.
Second, it brings new trust and regulatory issues. In order to reduce the cost and risk of traditional contract digital technology, people concentrate large amounts of data and processes in a few computing centers, and delegate the important responsibility of maintaining the system to a small group of professionals, which indeed reduces marginal costs. But this small group of professionals holds huge public powers, but they are usually organized as private companies and work in a black box. How to ensure their integrity and reliability, curb their impulse to use their monopoly position to distort the market, how to effectively supervise, and minimize the cost of supervision, have become crucial and very difficult issues.
Third, it brings about data privacy issues. Based on paper-based contracts, both parties can protect the data privacy of transactions and agreed matters. However, the electronic contract and centralized custody in a third-party centralized system is tantamount to exposing trade secrets to the custody platform.
Fourth, it brings about the problem of unfair data pricing. When a large amount of data, especially digital contracts, are centrally hosted on a third-party centralized platform, the centralized platform can obtain huge economic benefits through algorithms such as big data analysis and artificial intelligence. Whether the centralized platform will pay the data custodian for this and how to price the custodial data has become a problem. In fact, the prevailing phenomenon is that centralized platforms use their strong position to implement unfair strategies that benefit them.
So how does the blockchain improve its support for contract digitization?
First of all, the blockchain with its unique time-series singly linked list storage structure composed of hash pointers makes the contract expressed by the blockchain greatly improved in terms of consistency, tamper-proof modification, non-repudiation and reliability. Close to physical objects. This greatly reduces security risks and maintenance costs.
Secondly, the distributed and multi-party maintenance nature of the blockchain greatly improves transparency and reduces trust risks and supervision costs.
Third, the universal and ubiquitous cryptography applications of blockchain provide a wealth of means for protecting data privacy.
Fourth, the blockchain can effectively package and express data assets, and facilitate their transactions, and find their fair prices through the market.
Fifth, the smart contract in the blockchain can express the terms of the contract in code and automatically execute it when the condition is triggered, so that the execution of the contract, which originally required humans to complete, is replaced by a computer. This greatly reduces The execution cost of the contract.
Based on the above characteristics, we can say that blockchain is the first technology that can effectively support the digitization of contracts after computers and networks are produced. The digitization of contracts can only be realized after the emergence of blockchain. In contrast, the previous traditional contract digital technology is simply unqualified.
Just because the blockchain itself is a platform for digital contracts, and contracts are the basic expression of assets, the blockchain has become an ideal infrastructure for the digital expression of assets, that is, digital assets.
Digital expression of assets in blockchain
So far, digital assets mainly exist in the form of fungible tokens. Starting from Bitcoin , the vast majority of digital assets in the blockchain and open finance fields are designed as homogeneous tokens . In the Ethereum ecosystem, this homogeneous token is often created in accordance with the ERC-20 standard. According to our statistics, as of the end of September 2020, there are 297,000 ERC-20 smart contracts deployed on the Ethereum main chain, while there are fewer than 6,500 smart contracts that create heterogeneous tokens. The difference between the two is 45 times, which can be described as a huge gap. .
But in fact, according to the previous discussion, smart contracts are the most basic form of digital asset performance.
Ethereum supports Turing’s complete smart contracts, which makes the blockchain upgrade to a general digital contract management platform. In other words, the blockchain has the ability to express general, non-standardized contracts, which are smart contracts. Of course, its expressive ability is far from that of natural language, but it can solve many practical problems. Moreover, since the blockchain can digitally express general contracts, it can also digitally express standard contracts, tickets, securities, and currencies.
We show the corresponding technology as shown below:
Figure 7. Corresponding technologies of the five asset expression forms in the blockchain
At present, a variety of asset expression methods have been effectively supported in the blockchain:
Corresponding to general non-standard contracts and laws, implemented digitally in the blockchain by smart contracts;
Standard contracts are also implemented by smart contracts, except that the standard contracts can be implemented as smart contract templates or libraries;
Tickets are rich in content and widely applicable asset expression technology. At present, there is no standard implementation technology corresponding to the ticket in the blockchain. The closest is the non-fungible token (NFT), but it is still far from covering various scenarios of the ticket. Through in-depth use of smart contracts, this is not difficult to achieve.
Securities and currencies can be supported by tokens or native cryptocurrency in the blockchain. This is the most advanced and special form of asset expression, but it is the earliest realization in the blockchain .
It can be seen that the blockchain has the ability to support all major digital asset forms, and has brought huge technical advantages to the definition, management, and application of digital assets, making it the most ideal support platform for digital assets.
technical discussion
So far, we have expressed our main views on the issue of digital assets in text narratives. Readers with object-oriented programming experience may have noticed that the relationship description of the five types of digital assets (contracts, standard contracts, tickets, securities, and currency) in this article actually constitutes a typical class derivation chain. Therefore, using code to discuss this part of the content will be more clear and concise.
Therefore, the last part of this article discusses how to define the above five types of digital assets with codes.
In fact, the use of codes to define digital assets is not only for simplicity and accuracy in description, but also for huge practical application value. It must be stated that we are still studying this, and there are still many issues that have not been resolved. Even the solved problems, because intellectual property rights and commercial secrets may be involved, are not fully disclosed here. Only general ideas are proposed for reference.
When defining digital assets in code, a series of new problems and challenges will be encountered. Natural language can describe vaguely and broadly, and the code must be clear, precise and unambiguous. Therefore, how to reflect some of the ideas expressed in natural language in the previous article into the code has become a huge challenge.
For example, when defining assets, we mentioned that assets are expected to bring benefits. This sentence is easy to say, but how to express it as code? In other words, how does the code indicate that something has expected benefits? It seems impossible. But as we mentioned in the extended discussion of this issue in the first section, the direct inference that assets have expected returns is that assets must have arrangements for the distribution of income, that is, the rules for income distribution must be arranged in advance. Therefore, we believe that the way to express “assets have expected returns” in the code is to arrange a method allocate_benefit() to perform income distribution. Questions like this need to be carefully considered one by one.
The following will not elaborate on theoretical issues, but will directly describe several major digital assets in Python-like pseudo-code.
# Basic digital assets
class DigitialAsset:
def get_contract(): pass # Get the contract that represents the digital asset
def get_controller(): pass # Get the owner or controller of the digital asset
def allocate_benefit(): pass # Once the income is obtained, execute the income distribution
# Standard contract
class ContractTemplate: pass
class StandardContract(DigitalAsset):
def get_contract_template(): pass # Get standard contract template
@classmethod
def make(template, **kwargs): pass # Create a standard contract based on a contract template
# Ticket
class Coupon(StandardContract):
def print(): pass # The ticket can be printed
def get_rules(): pass # rules for getting tickets
def run_rule(rule): pass # Execute a rule
# Pass
class Token(Coupon):
pass # omitted here, please refer to the corresponding ERC standard
# Digital currency
class Cryptocurrency(Token):
pass # Omit here, please refer to ERC-20 standard
This article discusses a series of issues from asset definition to digital asset expression, classification, and blockchain digital assets. We first define assets as a collection of rights that are formed and adjusted by transactions or other agreed actions, have clear owners or controllers, and are expected to bring economic benefits. Then, we point out that contracts are the most general form of expression of assets, while standard contracts, tickets, securities, and currencies are the form of contract expressions with increasing standardization. For digital assets, this article defines them as the digital expression of assets. Corresponding to the five expressions of assets, the blockchain provides ideal digital support. Therefore, we believe that the blockchain is an ideal support and management technology platform for digital assets.
[1] Wang Zejian, General Principles of Civil Law
[2] Order No. 76 of the Ministry of Finance of the People’s Republic of China, Accounting Standards for Business Enterprises
[3] David Graeber, Debt: The first 5,000 years
[4] Zhou Ziheng, Account, Social Science Literature Press, 2017
[5] Yuan Dao, Meng Yan, token is the key to the next-generation Internet digital economy,
[6] Zhu Jiaming, the future determines the present: Blockchain·Digital Currency·Digital Economy, Shanxi People’s Publishing House, 2020
Acknowledgements: The relevant research work involved in this article was carried out at the request of Professor Zhu Jiaming, Chairman of the Academic and Technical Committee of the Digital Asset Research Institute, and was guided and reviewed by Professor Zhu. Shao Qing, deputy dean of the Digital Asset Research Institute, also reviewed and provided valuable comments on this article. Thanks also here.
