The Next Web Frontier Digital Native Asset Marketplace

Published in

RealtyDao

12 min readApr 3, 2021

The global focus on cryptonomics and its various real-world applications is taking the world by storm. All eyes are on the many blockchain platforms and tools that run it, and many more will join the not-so-speculative crypto economy and frontier that is shaping the next web.

RealtyDAO realizes the blockchain’s potential and its applications way back in 2010 when they launched Contrib, the first transparent contribution platform on the blockchain.

A public blockchain, readers will recall, is distributed with no real owners. This revolutionary technology has unsurprisingly inspired thought leaders to dream up a wide range of potential applications, from financial services to real estate to voting to decentralized ownership.

RealtyDao, which has years of blockchain experience, realizes that its real-world and digital applications are immense and revolutionary hence the need for a digital native asset marketplace and platform built for the next web frontier. RealtyDAO’s goal, on the other hand, is to be the new internet’s decentralized holding and development platform for digital native assets.RealtyDAO describes digital native assets as digital entities native to the internet with the ownership baked in the asset itself. Digital native assets can be classified into decentralized (TLD’s), Domains, apps, content, and tokens.

DNA’s that RealtyDao classifies and qualifies are those that have great real-world, value just like an app that has 1 million users.

While blockchain technology can bring new efficiencies and other benefits to the latest internet, currently, digital assets are the most widely used application of blockchain technology.

What is DNA (Digital Native Assets)?

RealtyDAO describes digital native assets as digital entities that are native to the internet with the ownership baked in the asset itself. Digital native assets can be classified into decentralized (TLD’s), Domains, apps, content, and tokens.

DNA’s that RealtyDao classifies and qualifies are those that have great real-world, value just like an app that has 1 million users.

While blockchain technology can bring new efficiencies and other benefits to the new internet, currently, digital assets are the most widely used application of blockchain technology.

Classifications of Digital Native Assets

RealtyDao classifies digital native assets in this simple infographic below.

But first, digital native assets should have real-world value.

The Internet of Value

Why should blockchain technology matter to you?

Quite simply, because it will revolutionize the world in many positive ways, as author Don Tapscott noted in Blockchain Revolution, blockchain takes us from the “Internet of information” to the “Internet of value.”

When you are sent an email, you receive a copy. The sender, and potentially many others, also have a copy. That’s fine for email; it’s a good thing for all involved parties to have a copy. But when it comes to assets (money, stocks, bonds, intellectual property, music, art, votes, etc.) it is not a good idea to get a copy.

Today we rely on big intermediaries — middlemen like banks, government, big social media companies, credit companies, etc. — to establish trust in our economy. As Tapscott wrote, “These intermediaries perform all the business and transaction logic of every kind of commerce, from identification and authentication of people through to clearing, settling and record-keeping… they capture our data, which means we can’t monetize or use it to better manage our lives, and our privacy is being undermined… so what if there were [ ] an Internet of value? Some kind of vast, global, distributed ledger running on millions of computers and available to everybody, and where every kind of asset from money to music could be stored, moved, transacted, exchanged, and managed — all without powerful intermediaries”.

What if, indeed…

Revolutionary Potential of Decentralized Intermediary Digital Asset Exchange Platforms

Just merely increasing the efficiency of financial transactions could save the world more than $2 trillion yearly. But the potential of blockchain technology extends far beyond financial transactions. The potential is truly revolutionary.

Consider the example of decentralized exchanges or DEX. A decentralized exchange is a digital assets market focusing on cryptocurrency and its many economics that does not rely on any third party individuals or organizations to hold customer’s funds; instead, the platform offers a direct peer-to-peer trading mechanism that allows the users to process their transactions on an automated system.

Blockchain indeed plays a significant role in keeping track of digital assets in a decentralized way and also deals with most of the problems brought about by centralized exchanges.

At this time, decentralized exchanges manage roughly 1–4% of the total trading volumes, and this is expected to grow between 5–20 times more in the next 24 months, assuming that the trading volumes don’t change and there is a constant correlation between the token price and the projected usage.

Disrupting Centralization of Tokenized Digital Assets

what if there were [ ] an Internet of value? Some kind of vast, global, distributed ledger running on millions of computers and available to everybody, and where every kind of asset from money to music could be stored, moved, transacted, exchanged, and managed — all without powerful intermediaries”.

Blockchain technology is accelerating towards mainstream adoption, and one of the most significant potentials of this technology is the tokenization of assets. By 2024, the market of security tokens could exceed that of cryptocurrencies. Tokenization offers more excellent opportunities for both entrepreneurs and investors. So how does it work, what can be tokenized and how can we ensure we’re issuing it or investing in it legally and safely? 1

Digital assets can themselves be assets or instead can reflect the ownership of an underlying asset. For example, electronic records that are the equivalents of negotiable instruments and electronic chattel paper would be digital assets, as would an electronic recording of a security interest in the underlying asset, such as recording title to real or personal property and the use of tokens to represent revenue streams from otherwise illiquid assets such as patents and commercial real estate (sometimes referred to as a “tokenized” or digitized asset).2

Digital native assets as we have classified will always have regulations in and around the blockchain but what if digital native asset owners are given a marketplace where :

you can tokenize your DNA’s perceived value and allow community token holders to govern the whole marketplace and platform
you can list a digital native asset and tokenize just a percentage of the asset’s perceived value to circulate money back to its development, funding, or to its future growth
you can create essential and fundamental products for your asset such as create a whole hosting platform for your top-level domains
you can verify and add value to your digital native asset by adding an NFT token to verify your ownership of your digital native asset

Centralized and Decentralized Domains

Experts agree that blockchain is in its infancy. It will need to overcome serious technical and regulatory challenges if it is to achieve widespread adoption.3

One such regulatory challenge is the emerging of decentralized domains such as Handshake’s decentralized naming and certificate protocol.

What is a decentralized domain?

Centralized domain names are the old-school domains of the internet. Extensions like .com, .net, .biz, and hundreds more are what the majority of businesses and establishments use in their web address.

They’re controlled by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers and purchased through a domain registrar like GoDaddy or Bluehost. The content is then hosted by a service like Amazon Web Services.

“Given current global trends in both business and government, it’s quite rational to want an alternative to relying on the benevolence of a large organization of significant power.”

Because these sites are only hosted in one location, they can easily be taken down if, for example, a government authority believes the content violates a law or regulation.

Because these sites are only hosted in one location, they can quickly be taken down if, for example, a government authority believes the content violates a law or regulation.

Over a one-year period from 2018 to 2019, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, along with Homeland Security, Europol, Interpol, and several police agencies, seized 30,500 domain names in 20 different countries that were selling pirated movies and TV shows, counterfeit apparel, and pharmaceuticals. But in countries with an authoritarian government, website takedowns are much more common, and the content being censored goes beyond the selling of illegal products.

Often, it’s news coverage the government doesn’t want the public to access, as information about the coronavirus or the Hong Kong protests in China. Decentralized domains, on the other hand, including extensions like .crypto, .eth, .bit, and more, are stored in many different places, making them virtually impossible to be taken down or censored.

Blockchain domains are valuable because they remove the need to trust a centralized authority like ICANN, and RealtyDao is poised to tokenize premium decentralized domains such as .eshare or .contrib, thereby increasing its internet of value.

“Given current global trends in both business and government,” according to Will Martino, CEO of the blockchain startup Kadena, “it’s quite rational to want an alternative to relying on the benevolence of a large organization of significant power.”4

Tokens and Cryptocurrencies

The two most common blockchain-based digital assets are cryptocurrencies and crypto tokens. The biggest difference between the two is that cryptocurrencies have their own blockchains, whereas crypto tokens are built on an existing blockchain.5

What Is a Cryptocurrency?

A cryptocurrency is a type of virtual currency, which can be traded and utilized as a form of payment for goods and services. Cryptocurrencies can be described by the following characteristics:

Decentralized, or at least without a central issuing authority. Instead, cryptocurrencies rely on code to manage issuance and transactions. They are built on a blockchain or other distributed ledger technology, which allows blockchain participants to enforce rules of the system in an automated fashion.

Uses cryptography (advanced encryption techniques) to secure the system. A cryptocurrency is issued directly by the blockchain protocol on which it runs and is therefore often referred to as a blockchain’s native currency.

Cryptocurrencies are not only used to pay transaction fees on the network but are also used to incentivize users to keep the network secure.

What Is a Token?

Crypto tokens — also referred to as utility tokens, or just tokens — are units of value that organizations or projects can customize and develop on top of existing blockchains.

CRYPTOCURRENCIES

A reminder: cryptocurrencies have their own blockchains — i.e., the Bitcoin blockchain’s native currency is bitcoin, and the Ethereum blockchain’s native token is ether — whereas tokens do not.

As an example, while ether is the cryptocurrency native to the Ethereum blockchain, there are many different tokens that also utilize the Ethereum blockchain.

CRYPTO TOKENS

Crypto tokens built using Ethereum include DAI, LINK, COMP, and CryptoKitties, rDAO among many others.

The most widely used standards are ERC-20, which creates tokens that can interoperate within Ethereum’s ecosystem of decentralized apps, and ERC-721, which creates non-fungible tokens that are individually unique and cannot be interchanged with others.

Typically, crypto tokens are programmable, permissionless, trustless, and transparent. Programmable simply means that they run on software protocols — also called smart contracts — that outline the features and functions of the token. Permissionless means that anyone can participate in the system without special credentials. Trustless means that no one central authority controls the system; it runs instead on the rules defined by the protocol. And finally, transparency implies that the rules of the protocol and its transactions are viewable and verifiable by all.

NFT TOKENS

Musician Grimes recently sold her crypto art through non-fungible tokens or NFTs for $5.8 million, while Chris Torres, creator of Nyan Cat, a famous internet meme, sold a one-of-a-kind version of his viral GIF for 300 ethereum or around $600,000. Artist Mike Winkelmann, also known as Beeple, sold one of his works for $6.6 million. The NFT space recently exploded with many musicians and digital artists exploring the route to sell their creations in the form of collectibles or art. We tell you what non-fungible tokens are and how they work.6

An NFT is a cryptographic token that represents something unique and has an individual characteristic that sets it apart. Owning an NFT is like owning a one-of-a-kind work of art or a collectible antique7

What are the different uses of NFTs?

Right now, the crypto industry is still trying to figure out what’s going to be the best use case for NFTs. The applications start from as trivial as unique images representing each NFT. For example, in the real world, all of us can have printouts and copies of the iconic painting Mona Lisa, while there is only one real portrait. Similarly, in the digital verse, there can be many copies of art, but the ownership lies with the person who owns that token, and this is the aspect, which caught everyone’s attention recently.

Another application of NFTs could be online to offline integration. “Today when you buy pieces of offline art, you have either custody it or keep it somewhere, that’s how the ownership is decided. But tomorrow, they can also be tokenized where a digital form of that art exists and whoever owns that token, own the real art,” said Shetty.8

“When someone transfers one NFT to someone else, the code, which represents the NFT, also gets transferred to the other person on the blockchain. This makes sure that one can check on the blockchain who owns the NFT. When an NFT is created it is put up on the blockchain and is time-stamped, therefore it makes digital ownership very simple and easy to identify,” said Nischal Shetty, chief executive officer of WazirX.9

The total value of NFT transactions quadrupled to $250 million last year, according to a study from NonFungible and L’Atelier. The number of digital wallets trading them almost doubled to over 222,179, while some traders were able to make profits of over $100,000.“We’re seeing a new generation of traders within the NFT market; people who are digitally native looking for digital native asset classes outside of established asset markets,” Ivanova said. “These are people who have amassed reputation and wealth and want to invest it in purely virtual assets like NFTs.10

Using NFT to verify digital native asset ownership and value is one important feature of RealtyDao, as they create an NFT per digital native asset as part of its initiative to embrace the future of blockchain.

A Digital Native Asset Marketplace and Platform

While crypto tokens, like cryptocurrency, can hold value and be exchanged, they can also represent physical or more traditional digital assets, or a certain utility or service. For instance, the eSH crypto token represents RealtyDao’s DNA theoretical real-world value. The process of creating crypto tokens is known as tokenization. This variety of unique digital assets is bringing the blockchain industry more possibilities for innovation in a new and expanding economy.11

And to use them in a consensus and transparent marketplace where it is tokenized and verified and contributed to is going forwards and embracing the future of the entire digital ecosystem. And this is the vision of RealtyDao.

RealtyDao is poised to create this marketplace and platform together with a small group of premium domain owners and they acknowledge the need of people who would take part in developing the web’s next frontier where you can trade an app’s esh to a tld’s esh.

Finally…

It’s true that there’s been lots of hype swirling around blockchain technology in recent years. But sometimes where there’s hype, there’s a real reason for that hype. And time is likely to prove that such will be the case with blockchain.12

While recognizing what digital native assets are and how they managed, stored, accessed, and secured, is important to the future of the next web. It is really important to have that marketplace now to aggregate these real-world digital native assets.

And if you’re still reading this, while connected to different apps in the world, don’t you think blockchain and its flexible uses are not “speculative” anymore?

Digitizing assets: how tokenization can open up investment opportunities, https://forkast.news/tokenizing-digital-assets-blockchain-investments-art-real-estate-gunnar-jaerv/

Blockchain and Digital Assets News and Trends — Lexology, https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=4942553b-4c4a-4ba6-aacb-6ad5f0606e72

Blockchain: The Potential and Pitfalls, https://www.ifc.org/wps/wcm/connect/news_ext_content/ifc_external_corporate_site/news and events/news/insights/perspectives-i2c5

A Decentralized Internet? How Blockchain Domains Could Fight Online Censorship. | Built In, decentralized domains, https://builtin.com/blockchain/censorship-decentralized-domains

Cryptocurrencies vs. Tokens: Digital Assets | Gemini, https://www.gemini.com/cryptopedia/cryptocurrencies-vs-tokens-difference

Your guide to non-fungible tokens: What NFTs are and how they work, https://www.livemint.com/money/personal-finance/your-guide-to-non-fungible-tokens-what-nfts-are-and-how-they-work-11614768696550.html, Abhinav Kaul

NFTs: Why crypto art and sports collectibles are suddenly so popular, https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/25/nfts-why-digital-art-and-sports-collectibles-are-suddenly-so-popular.html, Ryan Browne

Cryptocurrencies vs. Tokens: Digital Assets | Gemini, What is a cryptocurrency, https://www.gemini.com/cryptopedia/cryptocurrencies-vs-tokens-difference

» The World-Changing Potential of Blockchain Technology, https://rcgglobalservices.com/ph/the-world-changing-potential-of-blockchain-technology/