Storing Stellar assets in XLMwallet
While XLMwallet is definitely a Stellar wallet — and a very good one at that — lumens aren’t the only thing you can store in it. It’s just as good for storing any asset created on the Stellar blockchain. Today we’ll tell you how these assets work and what you can turn into an asset.
Stellar assets aren’t really cryptocurrencies. Rather, they are credits or tokens — they represent some kind of value. This value can be almost anything: a real-world currency, a service, an object, a quantity of a commodity, etc. The important thing is the representation.
You can think of an electronic wallet or an online casino as an illustration. When you top up your deposit on a gambling site, you get the same amount of dollars on your account as you added from your card. But those USD on your account aren’t real — they are actually tokens issued by the casino. It’s the same with physical casinos when they take your cash and issue you chips. If you win, you exchange those chips back to dollars.
Stellar assets work the same way. Each token you issue represents something valuable. Whoever owns a token should be able to exchange it for that valuable thing. Let’s look at a few examples of things that can be easily turned into assets on the Stellar blockchain.
1) Fiat currencies. This is already being tested by many financial institutions and IT companies. You can issue a token for each unit of a currency — say, Singapore dollar — and send those tokens abroad. On the other end, there should be another trusted institution to convert those tokens for cash. The tokens would be burned in the process. This is very similar to how Western Union works. The most famous Stellar-based project of this type is IBM World Wire.
2) Gaming. Most popular games (such as World of Tanks, DOTA, etc) have their in-game currencies that are used to by weapon skins, artefacts, and so on. As a game admin, you can issue an asset on Stellar for the same purpose. There are already blockchain startups that want to link different online games together by creating a single gaming currency. This will allow players to buy and sell items from various games using the same tokens.
3) SaaS platforms. If you offer services online, you can easily sell them for tokens. For example, a subscription can cost 1000 tokens a month, while a single service can be sold for 100 tokens.
4) Gambling. It’s very easy to link blockchain assets and online gambling business. As we’ve said, all casinos traditionally issue chips to their patrons. Instead of completely virtual “dollars” you can use actual tokens that can be transferred from one user to another. This could very well be the future of online gambling.
Of course, there’s always the problem of trust. When you buy tokens from an unknown issuer, it can be difficult to check if that issuer is trustworthy or now. This is the same with any type of IOUs (and Stellar assets are essentially IOUs): is the person who sells them to you honest?
To solve this problem, Stellar has a clever system called trustlines. In our next post we’ll tell you what they are. Meanwhile, subscribe to our Twitter and follow all the updates of XLMwallet!
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