A new blockchain protocol is presenting itself as a place where businesses and individuals can build peer-to-peer financial applications with confidence.

Bytom describes itself as the “infrastructure of the asset internet.” The company’s vision is to create diverse assets and a programmable economy and ensure that byte assets (such as cryptocurrencies and digital assets) and atomic assets — like securities, dividends, bonds and information existing in the physical world — can interact and circulate more easily.

In their white paper, the team behind the protocol say its architecture for creating applications “is friendly to mobile and other terminals and convenient for developers to develop asset management applications.” Meanwhile, the contract layer allows for the complete personalization of smart contracts. Bytom says that this accessible interface delivers flexibility to the crypto community, reduces the barriers to entry for fledgling financial apps, and enables entrepreneurs and developers “to focus on innovations” instead of technicalities.

According to the Bytom team, the internet is quickly transitioning from an age of “information is power” to one of “computing is power” — with big data and large-scale computing contributing to an era where the world’s economic structure is more greatly defined by byte information. To put this into an everyday context, the platform believes that “everything that is valuable and exchangeable in the real world will be migrated to the byte world” — creating an immutable, traceable record of assets and delivering symmetric information to all.

Supporting various types of different assets

To ensure that assets can be clearly distinguished on its platform, Bytom plans to use 256-bit string IDs and separate the assets on its network into two categories. The first asset is the BTM token, which will be distributed to miners and nodes. Bytom’s white paper says a proof-of-work mechanism is used to “encourage random anonymous miners to get involved in the entire ecosystem.” As well as being used for transaction fees when assets are traded, the other main purposes for BTM include the payment of dividends associated with income assets, as well as deposits for when assets are issued.

Bytom is available here

In the second category, remaining assets are divided into three further subcategories. While income assets could be classified as things such as film-making and home-stay properties, equity assets could include the equity seen in unlisted companies and private funds. Finally, securitized assets include debts, car loans and other asset-backed securities “that can generate predictable cashflows.”

Rapid and steady development

Since Bytom’s blockchain project formally began in January 2017, the platform says it has achieved a series of milestones — including the release of its testnet in September 2017, its mainnet in April 2018 and smart contracts in July 2018. Enhancements to the Bytom mainnet were made in the months that followed, and at the start of this year, its ecosystem and business are being launched.

In illustrating the services it can offer for peer-to-peer financial apps, Bytom says that decentralized exchanges wouldn’t need to rely on a third party to hold a customer’s funds, as users can trade directly through an automated process. The platform has also launched the Bytom Wallet — a “feature-rich, user-friendly, easy to setup” product that supports mining and enables users to “trade with the entire world.” The software is available for download on Windows, Mac and Linux devices — and comes complete with a user manual.

In January, Bytom announced that BTM tokens are now available on America’s Bittrex exchange, along with South Korea’s Upbit exchange, paving the way for its customers to benefit from BTM/Bitcoin trading pairs. According to the startup, the listing of its token “represents recognition of Bytom’s high quality.”

A bounty program is also in place that incentivizes users to alert Bytom to any glitches or security vulnerabilities users may encounter while using the platform. Daily tasks and long-term tasks are available, and rewards vary depending on the milestones achieved.

Learn more about Bytom