Who can create trusted digital assets in the blockchain world?

Author: Yan Meng, source: author twitter Yan Meng @ Solv Protocol | ERC-3525

What exactly can be called "digital assets" and what are "electronic assets"?

I used to think superficially that only those on the blockchain can be called "digital", and those in the centralized database can only be called "electronics".

I have recently rethought it, and I have a new view: **The key is not whether the form itself is "digital" or "electronic". The difference, if not vague, is far-fetched. **We all remember when the Internet was just emerging in the 1990s, people also said "digital survival" instead of "digital survival". **So whether it is stored in a decentralized ledger should not be regarded as an essential issue. The key is "assets". **

Assets are a concept in the legal sense and an institutional arrangement, which itself has the connotation of "credibility".

In this sense, digital assets in a broad sense are not only available after the emergence of the blockchain, but have appeared as early as the Internet era. Among the early digital assets we are most familiar with are orders on e-commerce websites. By interacting with the e-commerce website or app, you create a digital asset such as an order, which is stored in the database of the website, but its significance is only when the order is a contract, and the rights and obligations stipulated in it are finally fulfilled, that is, you Only after the qualified goods are indeed received and the seller has received the payment can it be finally confirmed.

In 2003 and 2004, I watched the early development of an e-commerce website. At that time, Chinese e-commerce was mainly based on the "cash on delivery" model. The biggest problem was that the courier or courier company disappeared after receiving the money. Abstractly speaking, this is the difficult exploration stage of "orders" before they become real "digital assets". Later, the rise of the third-party escrow transaction model represented by Alipay basically solved the logistics support and credit problems of e-commerce, making "orders" truly upgraded to "digital assets". In a sense, in fact, the e-commerce industry has achieved such a huge development mainly because of the "credible asset creation" matter.

**Back to the blockchain, the question becomes, who can create trusted digital assets? The so-called credible means that the rights and obligations stipulated by this digital asset can be fulfilled with a high probability. ****Why are there so many projects for cutting leeks? Because the project party is simply unable to fulfill the rights and obligations they have promised to their own tokens. **Once the problem is reduced to "creating credible digital assets", we will immediately realize that there are not too many people and institutions who are qualified to create digital assets. **You are a nobody, create 100 gold coin tokens, and advertise that each token corresponds to an ancient Macedonian Alexander gold coin, who will believe this? If it is not credible, it cannot be called a digital asset. The blockchain started from Bitcoin, which solved this problem in an ingenious way, because **Bitcoin has no external value promise at all, so there is no problem of dishonesty, and it relies entirely on consensus to endow internal value. value. **This method is ingenious, but not reproducible.

In the world, there is only such a mysterious existence as "money" that can't explain the value commitment clearly and can indeed establish a value consensus. After all, there is and preferably only one abstract value measure. Now many people play Memecoins, one of the internal reasons is that they feel that the tokens made by your project party claim a bunch of value promises, but they cannot be fulfilled. That being the case, it is better to play memecoins, there is no value promise, and I understand that telling everyone that I am a blank sheet of paper, but there is no risk of breaking promises. That's right, there is indeed no risk of dishonesty, but if it is reduced to a pure gamble, in fact, if you plan to invest in it, the probability of loss is still infinitely close to 1.

It is still necessary to focus on the theme of "creating credible digital assets" to analyze what the next step in the development of the industry may be. RWA may indeed be a breakthrough, and I analyze this matter from this perspective.

**The breakthrough benefit of RWA compared to direct transactions under the Web 2 chain is that it is transparent and borderless. **Transparency brings trust, borderless brings freedom. Because it is said a lot, and it is a cliché, and everyone will not feel it. In fact, trust and freedom, to achieve a goal is to turn the world upside down. For example, Web2 has been developed for so many years, and its capability boundaries and shortcomings are also very clear. To solve this problem, civilization will be upgraded.