Metaverse Explained: Certificates

Metaverse Explained is an ongoing series explaining Metaverse and its functionalities.

One of the most important goals of Metaverse is to make blockchain accessible to users who don’t have strong technical knowledge. In order to achieve this goal and to help users avoid scams, we have worked to ensure that MST symbols are easy to recognize. As opposed to ERC-20 tokens on Ethereum, each MST has a unique symbol, and, as of Supernova, each MST also has to be created by an Avatar in order to identify the issuer of the token. In accordance with this philosophy, Supernova has also added a system of certificates that will be described in this article.

An Avatar and his certificates in the Desktop wallet

Supernova implemented 3 types of certificates:

• Domain certificate
• Secondary Issue certificate
• Naming certificate

All certificates and their owners’ Avatars can be seen publicly in the explorer

Secondary Issue certificate

The Secondary Issue certificate confers upon its owner permission to conduct a Secondary Issue on a specific MST. This certificate is generated at the creation of a MST only if the Secondary Option has been selected. During the MST creation, the issuer will receive the certificate if he checked “Allow future Secondary Issue.”

By selecting “Allow future Secondary Issue,” MST creators receive the Secondary Issue certificate

If this option is not checked, the MST created will never be allowed to have new issuance and its Maximum Supply will never change.

This certificate is very useful for projects who need to increase their Maximum Supply over time. (The Secondary Issue function will be detailed in a separate article)

Domain certificate

This certificate grants its owner (and only its owner) the right to create a MST under a specific domain. The domain is the first part of a MST symbol, before the first dot. For instance, ParcelX owns 3 MST’s:

PARCELX
PARCELX.GPX
PARCELX.TEST

These MST’s are all registered under the domain “PARCELX,” and only the Avatar who owns the Domain certificate PARCELX is allowed to create any token called “PARCELX.(anything)”.

Like Secondary Issue, the Avatar issuing a MST will automatically receive the Domain certificate, if the Domain is available, upon MST creation. In correspondence with these rules, we recommend that companies use the following format for their MST symbols:

(company’s name).(token name)

This way, the company is guaranteed that only they can create MST’s under their company’s name. It is then easy to identify a group of MST managed by the same team or company. This is useful for projects like LeBlock who can create a “MST family” under their domain and be assured that only they can create new MST’s in this group — in this case, a new block color:

Example of a MST family on testnet

Naming certificate

This certificate is generated by a domain owner, and grants permission to create a MST under a corresponding domain.

You can issue a Naming certificate via the Desktop wallet. Here, I already own the domain ‘ANOTHERCOMPANY’ and want to give permission to the avatar ‘my-avatar’ to create the MST named ‘ANOTHERCOMPANY.NEWNAME’

Let’s check out an example: Company A owns the Domain certificate COMPANYA and is forming a partnership with Company B. Company A would like to emphasize this connection with Company B, and since Company B plans on creating a MST, Company A wants to let Company B create this new MST under their domain. The MST symbol will be COMPANYA.COMPANYB.

To do so, Company A can create a Naming certificate COMPANYA.COMPANYB and send it to Company B, who will then obtain the right to create the MST with this symbol, and with this symbol only, under Company A’s domain. In this process, Company A keeps the Domain certificate COMPANYA and only gives Company B the right to create the symbol specified by the Naming certificate under its domain.

The lightwallet displays your certificates in the Avatars page. ‘my-avatar’ now owns the Naming certificate created in the screenshot above

Certificates can be transferred between Avatars, making all of the aforementioned rights easily transferable. The certificates owned by an Avatar are publicly visible via the explorer: users can see all of the certificates currently owned by any Avatar, in addition to ones that have been transferred (spent):

Certificates and Avatars are designed to make it easy for users to distinguish legitimate MST from potential scams by displaying the Avatar who issued a MST and by guaranteeing that a MST symbol can only be created by an Avatar with ownership of the domain or with naming rights conferred by the domain owner. We hope that through the transparency of easily recognizable MST and a public record of certificates in the explorer, users can feel secure joining our community.