Extending Paymail for Tokens on Bitcoin SV
A Proposal
The Paymail identity protocol has been a great step forward in making Bitcoin easier to use for everyone. Gone are the days of needing to copy and paste a long string of seemingly random characters for each new payment. Users can now use a payment address as familiar as email.
Wallets can now include an address book of paymail handles without leading users to violate the privacy-leaking practice of legacy address reuse. With most major BSV wallet providers supporting this standard, the entire ecosystem is more interoperable and welcoming to new users.
Assets Aliases
When it comes to tokens on BSV, we believe there’s value to utilizing the same approach in creating unique, easy-to-read aliases for assets, regardless of the underlying token protocol. Rather than only defer to exchanges or individual platforms for managing asset ticker symbols, we propose an approach that extends the paymail standard to give each issuer their own namespace for as many assets as they’d like to create. The chosen asset alias is simply added to the front of the issuer’s paymail handle, separated by a colon.
Augmenting the paymail standard with a prefix as opposed to working within the handle formatting rules better differentiates asset aliases from the identities that standard paymail handles are better suited to represent.
Unlike Bitcoin’s native unit, all tokenized assets necessarily have an issuer for which the token represents a liability. Linking each asset identifier to the responsible party retains the most relevant information about the asset while adequately reducing the namespace for maximum flexibility. Like the paymail protocol, this solution also avoids contentious naming disputes and issues with namespace squatting.
Example UI
To demonstrate how this paymail extension improves the user experience, consider the interface for sending a payment request, invoice, or atomic-swap trade offer. Naturally, the asset a user wishes to send will be limited to balances already held. Searching through that set using the asset’s display name would often be adequate. The same does not apply when requesting tokens from another user where the set of potential assets to request is effectively unlimited. Using the asset alias paymail extension, a user would only need to type the asset issuer’s paymail handle into an auto-complete form field to quickly narrow down the list of suggested matches.
Suppose I wish to submit a trade request to James Belding for 21,000 class A shares of Tokenized Group Pty Ltd, in exchange for US dollars at a fair market price. Simply by typing in “:@tokenized.com” into the requested asset input field would reveal both class A and class B shares to choose from.
Note that in the above example, omitting the local part of the paymail handle resolves to the identity of the paymail host as determined by the domain component. We suggest this may be an appropriate way to directly identify an organization with the a local portion of a handle reserved for specifying an internal department, employee, director, etc.
Exchanges can even use this technique to reference tradable assets held in custody utilizing their own short ticker symbols.
At Tokenized, we believe this extension to the paymail protocol for identifying assets on BSV can be standardized across the ecosystem and we will soon be providing detailed specifications with our reference implementation for community review.
