Lots of projects in blockchain are exploring supply chain management and provenance. An immutable shared record is a logical fit for this industry. An implementation that is narrow in scope or bulky will have a hard time gaining traction with application developers and businesses seeking to adopt a standard. It may not be obvious how composables fit in here, but take a look.

A coffee farmer harvests a field into 500, 25kg bags of beans. They go off on different trucks to different roasters. At the roasters, bags receive data about the roast type. They end up on different trucks, on their way to shops. Once at the shop the beans are used, producing delicious coffee. A Brooklyn hipster scans a QR code and sees the beans she is drinking, where they were roasted, the roast type, the field, the farmer… You get the point. A tremendous amount of perceived value.

We can track several fields of coffee, from harvest to cup. By minting a new ERC-998 Composable for each harvest, we can then attach ERC-721 Non-Fungible Tokens to represent the bags, and if the bags also support the composable interface, we can place fungible ERC-20 tokens inside. This way, a cup of coffee can be seen as spending an amount of “bean” tokens from a specific bag, roast, roaster, harvest, farmer. Phew.

Use Case — Virtual Assets

If you’ve been in crypto for a minute, you’ve heard about CryptoKitties. Bringing the ERC-721 standard forward was a solid move by Dieter Shirley and parent company Axiom Zen. It forced the community to come together around a standard interface for NFTs. This meant companies like Rarebits.io could easily bring on new digital assets and userfeeds.io could build a layer 2 social network for users who owned digital NFT avatars like CryptoKitties.

Imagine an in-game item like a shield, with 5 mounts for special gemstones. You find a few stones, mount them, and decide to sell the shield. You can take this composition to a decentralized market. Thanks to the composable interface all the assets can be enumerated for the sale. Only a single purchase is needed to trade the shield to it’s new owner. Once received, the new owner can transfer the stones from the shield, perhaps equipping them to special armor where the combination is more powerful than it was with the shield. Lots to ponder.

Summary

Composable crypto assets are the next evolution of non-fungibles for the Ethereum blockchain and community’s decentralized applications. There are practical use cases that solve real world problems and fun use cases that give virtual game assets a whole new level of depth both in-game and in markets. Standard interfaces make it easier than ever to mix and match assets across protocols and decentralized applications. This is leading to more cross over, experimentation and communication in the community. Join the discussion here and help move this standard forward.

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