Real world asset management

Increasingly, blockchain technology is used to record and track the ownership of assets that are deemed to have real world value.

Real world assets can include physical assets—like real estate, works of art, precious metals, gemstones, or commodities—or financial instruments—like stocks, bonds, and securities—that are broadly accepted as valuable. With real world asset—or RWA—management, blockchain tokens represent these assets to enable transactions between owners and investors to be faster, more efficient, more transparent, and more secure.

In addition, the tokenization of real world assets enables more people to participate in the marketplace through fractional ownership of an asset that wouldn't be possible in traditional marketplaces.

In the Ethereum ecosystem, the ERC-3643 token standard defines interfaces for managing and transferring assets that require regulatory compliance or more stringent permissioned tracking for institutional investors. The Kadena RWA token standard provides a similar set of interfaces for the Kadena blockchain network written in the Pact smart contract language. The Kadena WA token standard includes several open-source smart contracts that define the interfaces to issue, manage, and transfer permissioned tokens on the Kadena blockchain network.

As a scalable, layer-1 blockchain with low transaction fees, the Kadena network is a strong foundation for delivering real world asset management on-chain. With the Kadena RWA token standard, builders and development partners can drive adoption into more traditional marketplaces

Initial and future implementation

The initial (real-world-asset-v1) implementation of the Kadena RWA token standard focuses on the functions required for an issuing agent or owner to bring assets on-chain. The implementation includes functions and capabilities for:

• Assigning participant roles as token issuing agents, token owners, and token investors.
• Issuing tokens that conform to compliance rules.
• Transferring tokens in compliance with the token standard.

This initial implementation also includes a pre-configured frontend to demonstrate the functionality of current contracts and their functions and a simplified approach to off-chain identity management using a KadenaID to make it easier to deploy and manage contracts during the initial rollout.

An external audit of the Kadena RWA token standard has been completed prior to the release the initial implementation. As the standard evolves, future implementations will focus on delivering features that are comparable to the ERC-3643 standard, extending compliance contracts, enhancing security, and strengthening identity management.

Core functionality

The real-world-asset-v1 token standard provides interfaces that are similar to the ERC-3643 token standard. The main interfaces in this implementation enable the tokenization of real-world assets with built-in compliance features. The implementation provides the core functionality for the following:

• Real world asset management operations to perform agent-managed actions such as pause, freeze users, forced-transfer, mint, and burn.
• Agent role operations to define and enforce roles for agents and owners.
• Identity registry operations to track and manage investor identities.
• Compliance operations to define compliance standards to add rules for minting, burning, and transferring assets.

Identity registry

For the initial implementation of the Kadena RWA token standard, the identity registry only supports registering and deleting identities without performing identity verification. Because of this simplified implementation, the Kadena RWA token standard implements the identity registry and the identity storage features in a single module. The functions defined in the ERC-3643 Identity Registry Storage interface are implemented in the Kadena RWA identity-registry-v1 interface.

Compliance

The initial implementation of the Kadena RWA token standard includes the following sample compliance contracts to demonstrate practical use cases:

• supply-limit-compliance-v1
• max-balance-compliance-v1
• max-investors-compliance-v1

For a complete function reference including internal methods, see X.

Get started

To get started with the Kadena RWA token standard:

1. Clone the repository.

   git clone https://github.com/kda-community/RWA-token && cd RWA-token

2. Review the directory structure.

3. Review the documentation.