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Introduction to Blockchain Assets

Figure Tech can expedite your journey into real-time blockchain-based digital asset management.

What Is an On-Chain Asset?

Discrete assets are represented on blockchains as Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), blockchain records indicating ownership of distinct digital assets.

Examples of NFT assets can include any unique item, such as loans, titles, or artwork. You may be familiar with the term "NFT" as it pertains to popular digital artwork, such as CryptoPunks or the Bored Ape Yacht Club. On Provenance Blockchain, NFTs typically represent financial assets.

Asset Lifecycle

The registration of a new asset on a blockchain is known as "minting" an NFT. On Provenance Blockchain, NFTs are represented using the Metadata Module and the Scope data structure.*

The Provenance Blockchain Metadata Module was designed to reason about data off-chain (thus preserving data privacy, such as PII), while recording the results of the asset data state (represented by the data hash) on the blockchain.

Recording the checksum or hash of asset data as part of the NFT record allows independent parties to prove asset data has not been altered, thus "Replacing Trust with Truth".

Once an asset NFT has been minted, the asset can be:

  • Classified or validated
  • Transferred to another party (change of ownership)
  • Sold in a bilateral-exchange using a smart contract
  • Pooled into a group of assets
  • Tokenized into shares, which may be sold separately
  • Transferred to a smart contract for more complex use cases, such as ongoing royalty payments at each subsequent sale

* We anticipate that the 1.10.x release of Provenance Blockchain will also incorporate the new Cosmos NFT Module.

Figure Tech Asset Onboarding API

The Figure Tech Asset Onboarding API simplifies the minting of asset NFTs on the Provenance Blockchain.

The Asset Onboarding "Minting" API performs the following operations on your behalf:

  1. Store the asset data into Figure Tech's Encrypted Object Store (EOS)
  2. Optionally permission Figure Tech's Asset Manager to read the asset data from the EOS
  3. Allows the choice of several pre-defined Scope Specifications (the "type" of NFT)
  4. Construct the required transaction messages to mint the NFT on Provenance (Scope, Session, and Record)
  5. Finally either returns the transaction to your application for signing and submission, or, if you're using our online Swagger API or handy NFT drag-n-drop, connects to your wallet to sign and submit the transaction.

How to Get Started