Omnibasis Blockchain Network structures data as an asset. Anything can be represented as an asset. An asset can characterize any physical or digital object that you can think of like a car, a data set or an intellectual property right. 


These assets can be registered in two ways: 

  • Asset can be created, for example, a  new car purchase can be recorded with the title to the owner of the car;
  • Asset can be transferred or updated, for example a car title can be transferred to another owner, or car had maintenance done and car record is updated.


Traditionally, people design applications focusing on business processes (e.g. apps for booking & processing client orders, apps for tracking delivery of products etc). With Blockchain we don’t focus on processes rather on assets (e.g. a client order can be an asset that is then tracked across its entire lifecycle). 


This switch in perspective from a process-centric towards an asset-centric view influences much of how we build blockchain applications. 


Intuitive and easy to use tools makes it simple for anyone to define an asset, update it or transfer the ownership.




Asset

An asset can represent any physical or digital object. It can be a physical object like a car or a house. Or it can be a digital object like a customer order or an air mile. An asset can have one or multiple owners, but it can also be its own owner. Think of an autonomous car or an IoT sensor that does transactions automatically. An asset always contains data that is immutable. In our example, the color and the registration number of a bicycle is immutable data.


Depending on the context, an asset can represent many different things.


An asset as a claim

An asset can represent an ownership claim for a particular object, e.g. it represents a claim that User ABC owns the bicycle with the number XYZ. This can be valid for any type of ownership.


An asset as a token

An asset can also represent a token. Blockchain supports divisible assets. This means, multiple assets can be issued and attributed to one overarching asset. This can for instance be used for token launches.


An asset as a versioned document

An asset can also be a versioned document with the version stated in the metadata field. The version of this document can be updated on a continuous basis. Every time there is a new version of the document, it could be reflected in the metadata. 


An asset as a time series

An asset can also represent a time series of data. For instance, an IoT sensor records its own data. The IoT sensor is the asset and every submission of its data (e.g. temperature) is represented as an update in the metadata with the latest temperature that the IoT sensor measured.


An asset as a state machine

An asset can also be a state machine where the state transition is represented in the metadata. Each time the machine changes its state, a transaction is triggered to update the metadata to the new state (possibility to listen to it with the WebSocket).


An asset as a permission (RBAC)

Assets could also be: roles, users, messages, (and anything which can have multiple instances in a scenario — vehicles, reports, and so on). 


As you can see, there are almost no limits with respect to what an asset can represent.