BFAR Smart Contracts: Part 3 — Swap and Burn — Multiple VSP’s under One Standard
As the premise of selling virtual spaces that correspond to physical locations takes hold, we will start to see other platforms offering the same to the global community via the smart contracts of blockchain platforms.
Decentralisation means a company places faith in their community to use their platforms utility tokens for their (the company’s) intended purpose; however, everyone in effect becomes a ‘centralised entity’ as that ‘intended purpose’ can only be unlocked by the ‘digital keys’ — the platforms cryptocurrency.
Upgrading for a New Purpose
We are all familiar with ‘forking’ — which occurs when:
A single blockchain splits into two, either due to:
- A Split in Consensus
or
2. A Change in the Underlying Rules of the Protocol
Forks give rise to new blockchains and while sometimes contentious demonstrate the importance of community, democracy and most importantly — ‘General Consensus’, in decentralisation.
The BFAR smart contract is introducing a new concept; the Swap and Burn feature or ‘Swop Contract.’ Like a fork, it is a way for the community to breathe new life and meaning into something that was intended for one purpose but by General Consensus has evolved into something new.
Unilateral, Decentralised, Decision-making
When a blockchain forks it needs to convince enough nodes and miners on the benefits of the new protocol and once consensus is met, the new chain is created.
With utility tokens, namely ERC20 produced tokens, they are normally designed for a specific purpose native to the platform rules of the issuing company. We believe that this ‘rigidity’ can be detrimental to decentralisation as it forces bearers to ‘obey’ rather than ‘find purpose and adapt.’
This is especially true in the case of virtual space — there is no ‘one land layer’ but rather multiple layers, which we call the ‘AR Multiverse.’ However, currently, there is only one code of conduct to uphold AR Governance using the blockchain — the Bubbled Framework for Augmented Reality (BFAR).
BFAR is working hard together with digital businesses, brick and mortar businesses, schools, local authorities, individuals and legislators to ensure that the transition into the ‘8th mass medium’ of augmented reality doesn’t conflict with current laws, such as Spatial Law and GDPR. This means that any BFAR-created ERC20 token or ERC721 land parcel is automatically covered by our code of conduct and gives businesses and organisations the assurance that they need as they enter the realm of communications in augmented reality, that they do so with a view to upholding law and avoiding unforeseen litigation due to breaches of existing law.
As such, any bearer of a non-BFAR issued ERC20 token, from a VSP, that allows the bearer to record ownership of a virtual space for hosting digital content can decide to use the ‘swop’ feature of the BFAR contract to unilaterally start the registration process with BFAR of this new Virtual Space Provider (VSP), resulting in the burn of the original token and mint of the BFAR-issued token.
Benefits of becoming a BFAR registered VSP
Let’s use an example.
Suppose there is a blockchain start-up called ‘APPLELAND’ (AL) selling virtual space for hosting AR content and they issue a finite amount of ERC20 tokens as currency to create new ERC721 land parcels. There are several issues AL may face.
· How do they prevent the asset/currency issue we touched on in the previous article, with no decentralised reserve to circulate their currency?
· What are they doing about AR governance to protect their land owners against litigation in matters they may require legal recourse?
· How are they protecting the business owners that pay landowners to advertise on their virtual space from potential litigation i.e. maybe their land owner is hosting content on a physical location which breaches spatial law and the physical landowner decides to sue the business (not the virtual land owner) that is advertising there. The business then decides to sue the virtual landowner for ‘not explaining that he didn’t have the right to advertise at that location’ and in turn the virtual landowner sues — who?
· How are all actors in the above scenario protected with no code of conduct to adhere to and dictate ‘what happens if’ in this new realm of communications in augmented reality?
· Where do physical landowners visit to see who is distributing digital content to their location when there is a multitude of VSP’s serving experiences at that location?
A bearer of the AL token (lets call it APP) can spend APP via our land app which causes BFAR to start the registration process of a new VSP.
BFAR creates a mirror image based off the same contracts that govern the VSP Bubbled; same amount of land parcels, a decentralized reserve and mints new APP tokens (lets call them APP2) whenever it receives ‘old’ APP’s in a 1:1 ratio; burning the old token and replacing it with the BFAR issued APP2.
This is now a BFAR version of APPLELAND and becomes a newly registered Virtual Space Provider where land parcels created with the new BFAR issued tokens create BFAR land parcels.
Unverified vs Verified
The original APPLELAND contract creators now face a problem (if they see it as such). Their users are unilaterally deciding that they would rather build with a view to AR governance and are ‘forcing’ them to do the same. At this point AL can decide to officially register with BFAR as a VSP and become verified or continue unverified and let their token holders make the decision for them.
Benefits of verified VSP’s
Via the Virtual Space Naming System (http://vsns.io) individuals will be able to register their MEW addresses with human readable names that correspond to the VSP they are buying land from. For instance, if Bubbled wanted to buy land on Appleland they would be able to record their 0x buying wallet as bubbled.appleland (Naming convention vs://bubbled.appleland — more on this can be read here).
It can be likened to registering a domain name at Godaddy. You record ownership of your domain name so content from your server is easy to locate; that domain name ends in the top-level domain (TLD) .com, .co.uk, .org — but there are usually hundreds of tld’s i.e. .land, .photography, .space — these are all applied for and registered via ICANN (https://icann.org).
BFAR is the ICANN for virtual spaces that adhere to a code of conduct for AR governance.
Virtual Space Providers that register their ‘top-level domain’ identifier enable their AR experiences to be mapped back to legal owners for meting out legal recourse in litigation. The same way WHOIS allows you to see who the owner of a domain is, VSNS enables you to see who (or at least which 0x wallet) owns a virtual space.
Verified VSP’s collect fees whenever their users want to give their 0x address a human-readable name; if the VSP is unverified fees collected go to a multisig wallet controlled by BFAR and the original contract address of the VSP. Once verified, VSP’s can collect whatever fee’s have been amassed by the multisig wallet otherwise fee’s collected are periodically sent to the Bubbled Foundation.
Bubbled is building an AR platform whose framework is solving issues of ownership and governance within real-world spaces hosting augmented reality content. Join our Telegram and follow for updates on our Token Generation Event.
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