The OpenST Protocol
We just published the technical white-paper for OpenST, the protocol at the heart of the Simple Token project. We encourage and appreciate all inputs and feedback (via our Telegram channel is best). Benjamin Bollen and Nishith Shah led this work with active participation from Lionello Lunesu, Sunil Khedar, Antoine Cote, Jason Banks, Matt Chwierut, and Brian Lio.
Simple Token [“ST”] is an ERC20 token and OpenST is a protocol to support token economies in mainstream consumer applications. The business and technical challenge we set out to solve is to enable mainstream consumer applications to benefit from deploying their own branded crypto-backed token economies, in a scalable and cryptographically auditable manner, without needing to mint and maintain their own publicly-tradeable ERC20 tokens.
The OpenST protocol enables the creation of utility tokens on a utility blockchain while the value of those tokens is backed by staked crypto-assets on a value blockchain.
We want to take a moment to thank our advisors and extended team.
- Smith+Crown has and continues to provide invaluable expertise on token economics. Considerations on how vibrant token economies can grow have been paramount to shape technical mechanisms presented here.
- Enuma Technologies has been instrumental to provide grounding blockchain engineering realism. We thank them for sharing our bold vision and working with us to break it down into a roadmap that bridges an earliest minimal utility for the protocol to an open platform for tokenized mainstream consumer applications.
- Special thanks go to the teams of King & Wood Mallesons and Perkins Coie for continued legal and regulatory review of the technical proposals put forward across jurisdictions.
- Similarly thanks goes out to PwC for advice on tax and governance matters.
- We thank the teams behind SparkChain for the amazing work on supporting our communications, helping us to build FAQ and find clear language to convey our vision.
- Duoh — thank you for gorgeous graphics and designs (and the incredible speed of turning these over in near real-time as we worked through technical proposals)!
- Very special thanks goes to Jehan Chu, John Fiorelli and the entire team at Kenetic for their support and advice from the early days of Simple Token.
- Last but not least, thanks to the amazing teams and support from Pepo who are working closely with us to integrate the very first prototypes already into Pepo, and to Pepo’s early financial backers whose support enabled the Simple Token concepts and project to develop over the past 18 months.
We want to reserve a special paragraph for future-thanking our smart contract and security auditors who will be an integral part to the success of OpenST and Simple Token. We look forward to working closely with you.
A second future thanks is reserved for our future team members. We are hiring in Berlin, Germany and Pune, India. We have our work carved out and are looking for exceptional and driven people to join us on this journey. Reach out on hiring@simpletoken.org and share your insights on Simple Token with us! If you’re not currently in those locations, we still want to hear from you.
And finally let’s take a step back. We want to thank a great many amazing decentralization technology teams, often underappreciated for the hard work they deliver that keeps pushing the technology forward at mind-boggling speeds. This is truly an open-source community where the free flow of ideas and technologies makes us all stronger. Simple Token would not be possible if it could not build on ground breaking work. Simple Token and OpenST will look to earn its place in this ecosystem and contribute back where possible.
Specifically thanks goes out Tendermint/Cosmos, Parity, Go-Ethereum, Solidity, Monax, Lightning Network, Raiden, Interledger teams and the wider Ethereum community in no particular order. A word of thanks goes out to the Bitcoin community for kicking all this off, and being the first fighters for user financial sovereignty.
All errors are our own.
