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When we are talking about using Blockchain for apps, processes and enterprises, there is one element that is the most crucial aspect:

smart-contract standards

A smart contract platform like the future LUKSO public permission-less EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) Blockchain is a common infrastructure to develop and build the digital future for the lifestyle space. But none of this will be as impactful as it can be if we don’t provide developers and companies with basic building blocks in the form of standards.

If we look back at the early days of Ethereum, we see that the first-ever public smart contract standard had a significant impact on the ecosystem: ERC20. This standard that was proposed by myself in 2015, led to a whole industry of token based businesses and formed the basis for what we call #DeFi (Decentralized Finance) today. It was a simple agreement of the community to let all token smart contracts use the same basic functions: balanceOf() , transfer() , transferFrom() , approve() and allowance() with some additional events. This simple agreement lead to unprecedented interoperability and compatibility of wallets, exchanges and token-based protocols and opened up the ability to build new things on top of this standard.

For LUKSO we will make sure to have those basic building blocks available, but even more, have them be interoperable while thinking about the larger solutions as well. For example: One problem we have with tokens in the Ethereum community is discoverability, meaning how can a wallet simply discover all tokens that were sent to an address?

Today’s solutions are quite hacky: the wallets simply scan the most popular token contracts for balances of that address and allow the user to add more. While this works to some degree, it requires either token to be popular, or the user to remember which unpopular ones he received — which is far from ideal. Those problems can be solved in a much more automated way by adding a tracker registry when tokens are received to the user’s wallet smart contracts.

Some standards are very relevant to the LUKSO community and those are Digital Certificates for products (digital and physical) and User and Company identities.

The latter is such an important building block, that I think it will also greatly benefit the Ethereum community at large. Therefore I started the ERC725 standard in 2017, which we will make great use of in the LUKSO standards suite.

Why using a separate standards process, if we have the EIP process?

The Ethereum Improvement Proposals are a great place for generic standards, but the noise level there is high. Meaning: any new standard proposal has a hard time to be heard, let alone a whole set of standards. Additionally, the community behind Ethereum is focused around #DeFi and new decentralized protocols, while some of the standards we will discuss and propose are mainly relevant for the new creative economies, like lifestyle and fashion.

To deal with visibility and also have the opportunity to improve and alter existing ERC standards to work better in concert with each other, the LUKSO Improvement Proposals (LSP) are a better place to discuss the LUKSO Standards Process (LSP) and offer a clean set of basic standards and tools to use on LUKSO.

The LUKSO standards workshop series

Over the next coming months we will hold multiple standards workshops to explore and discuss basic smart contract standards for:

Digital Certificates : These are identities for products: physical or digital, to make them own-able and attach information, e.g. supply chain and provenance information as well as authenticity signatures.

: These are identities for products: physical or digital, to make them own-able and attach information, e.g. supply chain and provenance information as well as authenticity signatures. Identities : Smart-contract-based identities for users and companies to establish manageable and verifiable accounts that allow full control and ownership while hiding technological complexity.

: Smart-contract-based identities for users and companies to establish manageable and verifiable accounts that allow full control and ownership while hiding technological complexity. Tokens : Tokens function as basic component for new forms of community interactions, with better discoverability and compatibility.

: Tokens function as basic component for new forms of community interactions, with better discoverability and compatibility. Registries : Allow for automated verification and discoverability from users to products and authentication claims.

: Allow for automated verification and discoverability from users to products and authentication claims. Processes: Allow for standardized forms of ownership claims of physical and digital products, and other forms of automated generic processes.

As LUKSO is an effort to establish a common infrastructure, initially it will be heavily driven by the fashion and lifestyle landscape. We are hosting players from technology providers to brands, fashion groups and luxury automotive to participate in that process.

On September 6th we will hold the first introductory workshop on that matter in our new office in Marina Marina, Berlin, to establish the first basic set of standards processes to be worked on over the course of the next six months.

These workshops will bring the knowledge of standards and smart contracts supplied by the Agency for the Future (The founding company behind the LUKSO Blockchain Foundation, which is commissioned to building the network initially), and the insight from industry players to establish neutral open source and general purpose smart contract standards to benefit anyone using the LUKSO network in the future — as well some standards that will likely benefit the current Ethereum community.

We are looking forward to publish the results of these workshops in the LIP repository as well as some generic standards as EIPs and to provide the future LUKSO ecosystem with the basic building blocks to establish a driving ecosystem around our social digital lifestyle.

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