Re: Non-currency asset transfers & Connector commissions

Hi David,

Sorry if this has been answered already, but can anyone clarify if ILP is
> intended to be used for non-currency assets transfers (assuming a fungible
> non-currency asset)?
>
> Great question. ILP is meant to support fungible assets indeed. At
BigchainDB, we think of supply chains, shares, tickets, IP, licenses, and
so on.

In fact, we have a little share trading demo
<https://github.com/bigchaindb/bigchaindb-examples#example-share-trader>
that we would like to port into an ILP setup.

>
> However, it's not clear to me how will the ILP connector "fee system"
> would work in a case like this.  For example, imagine I want to transfer 10
> shares of stock from one brokerage account to another.  I think I can wrap
> my mind around how to model that in ILP, but how does the connector
> "charge" for its services?  It seems impractical to take a percentage of
> shares off of my transfer.  Instead, a connector would want to additionally
> transfer some sort of currency to itself as part of the transaction to
> "pay" for the connector usage.
>

Indeed, this has been on our minds also. I think there are few possible
scenarios, and I can imagine our community to come up with even better ones.
In general, one would like to see a payment receipt for the charges in
order to transfer the shares. Hence the traders would need to connect -
besides their shares ledger - to an ILP compatible payment ledger.
The payment ledger would then create an ILP fulfillment URI to fulfill the
shares transfers that are in escrow. It's still a bit vague but it would be
truly cool if we can spin up a demo for this. (Actually I would be
interested in doing so on the ILP hackaton 6/july in London). I can imagine
many more use cases that would follow such a pattern

This is only one stream of thoughts. I am sure others might be more in
detail/efficient

>
> My read of ILP is that each transaction can only involve one "type" of
> asset (whereas this would involve 2 types - the stock, and some currency as
> a commission).
>
> Actually, we advocate that a ledger should only contain one type of
assets. But ILP allows to connect homogeneous ledgers of various asset
types, given there are suitable connectors/exchanges. The latter will be an
interesting topic for ILP. Moreover, it would be interesting if there would
be a formal registry of asset types.

Definitely a good question worth asking!

Have a nice weekend,

Dimi


Dimitri De Jonghe, PhD
Developer

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