Towards a Smart Asset Model for Digital Assets on Blockchains

Abstract

Effective management of digital assets on blockchains is increasingly important for enhancing transparency and efficiency in areas like Supply Chain Management and ownership of user-generated content on the Web. Blockchains often have a very limited set of native transaction and asset types (usually a cryptocurrency) but allow user-defined transactions and assets implemented as part of programs called smart contracts. However, the semantics of these user-defined components are opaque to the blockchain engine, limiting reuse in transaction and asset modeling, blockchain interoperability and opportunities for automatic optimization of user-defined blockchain transactions. This paper explores the explicit modeling of digital assets and their impact on blockchain performance and usability. In particular, we introduce an approach for enabling a smart asset model and propose an implementation approach using the BigChainDB blockchain database as our context. We present an empirical evaluation that shows significant improvements in transaction latency, throughput, and correctness over traditional smart contract systems.