What does a tokenized game asset really imply?
When it comes to defining what exactly is a tokenized game asset, the common knowledge is defined by a token sitting in your wallet giving you access to a certain game item or collectible art piece.
Note this is true for game assets but it’s true for many different potential use cases. For the sake of simplicity and because games, as of 2019, are the most common use case for blockchain tokenized assets, I will talk about game assets.
If you are not familiar with blockchain game assets or NFT I suggest you read this article
The way to dumb it down is stating that a tokenized asset is simply a text entry on an immutable ledger, whereby someone who has a kind of authority decides that this token represents the ownership of a particular asset: for example, a collectible card. In summary, it’s a property title usually enforced by a single individual or company.
Blockchain brings the convenience of allowing people to easily issue transparent, immutable, non-duplicable property titles.
While the token rules can be defined in a smart contract, the governance of the asset is less clear. For example, if someone issues a token representing his piece of art on Ethereum blockchain using a unique ERC-721 what happens if the same person reissues another token representing the same piece of art on another blockchain, for example, EOS? Which of those tokens is genuinely representing this single piece of art?
The ORB concept
I’m part of a working group in Blockchain Game Alliance where we are trying to solve the metadata standardization (how the underlying assets can be easily found) and defining asset ownership license. The outcome of the working group might be a great help for the ecosystem.
There is still another unsolved problem, I’m working on Crystal Suite which is a suite of tools helping game developers and used to view and leverage their game assets coming from multiple token standards, and multiple chains. The goal is to answer a simple question; does this user own a particular asset?
If the asset is represented in only one blockchain using one token standard it’s pretty easy to query a single smart contract and get the answer. I started to struggle when the asset exists on multiple chains and or multiple standards.
Another difficulty is some NFT collections have several tokens representing the same asset.
There is a missing word and concept to define the relationship between a token and an asset. We called it ORB (Ownership Read on Blockchain)
An ORB associates a token contract with the required parameters to identify a specific account unit and the underlying asset. For example, in an ERC-721 “tokenId” is required to identify a specific item.
Orbs definition across different blockchains/sidechains and standards
If one asset is linked to two different tokens
- 1 asset, 2 tokens 2 ORBs
If one token is linked to two different assets
- 2 assets, 1 token, 2 ORBs
We are using this ORB structure across our development workflow to easily provide the ability to interact with game assets regardless of token contract infrastructure. This way it’s possible to offer a consistent experience for users and developers who want to integrate tokenized game assets.
We are working to soon release an ORB API along with a multichain tokenized assets explorer. I will keep posting updates as it evolves.