May 13, 2014 (Dublin, Ireland) – The Irish company who released the prediction market Predictious last year is now unveiling their brand new colored coins wallet Coinprism, as well as the Open Assets protocol (http://openassets.org).
Open Assets is a new generation Crypto-protocol based on Bitcoin. At the core, Open Assets is simply an implementation of the colored coins idea. The concept is that the protocol takes a very small amount of Bitcoins, and “colors” them with an asset type and quantity, defined by an issuer. The assets can then be transferred through the Blockchain, frictionlessly and in a decentralized fashion, by simply sending the Bitcoins that carry them.
Crypto 2.0 platforms can be divided in two families. The platforms that leverage the Bitcoin network, and the platforms that emigrated to a separate network or Blockchain.
Open Assets, Mastercoin and Counterparty are all in the first family. However there are some important distinctions between the “metacoin” approach taken by Mastercoin and Counterparty, and the open approach taken by Open Assets. Both Mastercoin and Counterparty require the users of the protocol to buy units of additional infrastructure (MSC and XCP) before they can use the protocol.
Open Assets follows a direct approach whereby transactions are normal Bitcoin transactions. Therefore, users only need Bitcoins to use it, and even then, they can choose not to pay any transaction fee at all, if they don’t care about the confirmation speed.
“Imagine how the Internet would be like if you could only access it from machines sold by the company who invented it”, said Flavien Charlon, Founder of Coinprism, “this is the state of Crypto 2.0 protocols today. Gateway currencies are entirely unnecessary, and make the system more closed and centralized than it needs to be. We already have a widely adopted crypto-currency, and it’s called Bitcoin”.
When compared to the second family of Crypto 2.0 platforms, which exist on separate Blockchains, Open Assets has the benefit of not asking the user to move off to a separate network. Alternative platforms are fighting the uphill battle of the network effect. In addition to that, Bitcoin is the most secure Blockchain as of today, since a 51 attack would cost hundreds of millions of dollars to the attacker.
Open Assets will particularly appeal to smaller communities who want to have their own currencies but are still unsure how to go about it. The community of players of the popular building game Minecraft, for instance, came up with CraftCoin. CraftCoin is an alt-coin based on Litecoin, and is used by players as the de-facto reserve currency within the virtual worlds they create. For this type of community however, maintaining an entire separate Blockchain is clearly overkill, in fact, it would take only $25,000 of mining equipment to perform a successful 51 attack on the network. Open Assets is a perfect solution for those communities, as it provides both a secure and portable way of issuing and managing their own coin. Because Open Assets is fully compatible with the smart contracts supported by Bitcoin, they could also simulate mining by controlling issuance through a multi-signature address.
Coinprism is the new web wallet that allows people to access the Open Assets platform. The public launch date is set for May 13th. It works like a normal Bitcoin web wallet, except it does not only display the Bitcoin balance of an address, but also the balance of every asset that the user possesses. This allows the user to manage all their different coins and assets from one single place.
Coinprism also lets the user issue their own asset with just a few clicks. The website will ask the user for information about the asset, like the name of the asset, the name of the issuer, a description, and even a customizable icon. This information is then displayed on the wallets of all the owners of the asset.
In terms of security, all the signing and encryption is performed on the client side, within the browser. The private keys of the addresses are only ever transmitted to the server in an encrypted form, so even if Coinprism is compromised, it will be impossible to steal users’ coins and assets.
Several companies have started lining up to leverage Open Assets. Signatur, a hardware cold-storage wallet startup, has already planned to raise crowdfunding capital through Coinprism.
ABOUT PIXODE
Pixode is a startup founded in 2010 and based in Dublin, Ireland. Pixode is in the social and mobile application space, it released several Facebook games and applications for business pages (Forum for Pages), as well as mobile games (Warp for Windows Phone 8, YouTube DJ for Windows 8/RT). More recently, Pixode launched Predictious, now the number one prediction market operating in Bitcoin.