The Purpose

If Bitcoin is all about the independent ownership and control of cash wealth, then Ravencoin is all about the independent ownership and control of assets and securities.

“Only a third of the world’s wealth is in cash, so we’re fighting this great, valuable, noble fight to say let’s make bitcoin or things like bitcoin become the new global reserve currency. Wonderful, I’m all there, but it’s only a third of the world’s money. Even if you win you still haven’t changed the whole global economy. You need to give people that kind of same power for their equities.” — Bruce Fenton, Board of Directors at tZero, Former Executive Director of the Bitcoin Foundation, VP at Morgan Stanley, 20+ Stock Broker, Financial Manager, & more…(from “The Flippening” podcast, Part 1 of “Tokenize The World: A Security Token Audio Documentary”)

In its simplest form, Ravencoin can be described as a platform for tokens and tokenized assets. The creation, issuance, and trading of these digital assets is the primary use case of the project. Features of the protocol happen to make it especially equipped for the issuance of security tokens, which can represent investment agreements between people, property, equity, and more; as well as anything from collectible goods to “utility tokens”. (You can learn more about the different supported asset types later in the article.)

A deceptively simple concept, the world has already begun to understand the potential for tokens as an asset market; and yet, surprisingly few projects seem to be focused on this as their core use case. Even fewer projects still were fairly launched with no ICO, no pre-mine, and no developer set-aside of funds. As of this writing, ICOs have already raised over $6.3B in 2018, despite uncertain market conditions and a significant drop in the number of offerings. Some say this pales in comparison to the potential of real contractual investment agreements and assets being traded in token form, as opposed to speculative utility tokens or commodities. This concept of securities on the blockchain, or “security tokens”, are an increasingly popular topic, as the idea proposes to not only provide new benefits such as programmability, increased liquidity, and more; but also entirely replace a multi-trillion dollar infrastructure of inefficient third party intermediaries. One of the loudest advocates of this idea is the co-author of the Ravencoin whitepaper himself, Bruce Fenton:

While you will still always have to trust the issuer of an asset itself, the number of entrusted third parties and inefficient redundancies involved in the legacy system containing these financial assets is quite astounding. Truly controlling your assets is nearly impossible, moving them takes days to weeks, and they technically aren’t even in your name!

“Despite what you believe, you don’t own your stock. The 12 pages in your brokerage agreement contain pledges & hypothecation agreements. If Apple issued a stock certificate, it wouldn’t bear your name. It would have The DTCC’s” — Bruce Fenton

If you believe in the benefits of tokenization, then it is hard to argue against the benefits of tokenizing securities. You can read more about security tokens in general throughout the web, including at these recommended sources:

Security Tokens: How Wall Street and Blockchain Will Collide

https://medium.com/future-blok/security-tokens-how-wall-street-and-blockchain-will-collide-8526634a9230 Tokenize The World: A Security Token Documentary

https://blog.nomics.com/flippening/security-token-documentary/

Ravencoin sets itself apart from other token platforms through its unique approach to the use case. On a basic level, unlike layer 2 solutions, which build separate infrastructure on top other blockchains, such as the Omni Layer project which you can use to create tokens on top of Bitcoin, Ravencoin is being designed from the ground up to support these features natively. It will also support the porting of other layer 2 tokens to the RVN chain, something which will be facilitated by the operation codes in the protocol.

Ravencoin even offers an alternative approach to the token application of Ethereum, boasting a native, asset-aware wallet that facilitates the intuitive creation, issuance, transfer, and management of tokens; opting for unique asset names as opposed to contract addresses, and utilizing Rootstock (RSK) to keep smart contracts off-chain instead of bundling code with transactions on the blockchain. In a sense, you could describe Ravencoin as a fairly launched, Bitcoin-based alternative to Ethereum as a token platform; but made specifically for those tokens, tokenized assets, and security tokens; rather than a decentralized computer for applications that also happens to be used for those things. It also makes a few different design choices in that regard; which issuers, developers, and users may or may not find useful for their needs.