I’ve recently been thinking a bit about data as an asset and the concept of data asset tokens. Much of my thinking was influenced by Michael Clark whom I had the pleasure of meeting at the recent Filecoin Uncharted event (thanks Porter). This post is probably more about vocabulary than content, but vocabulary is important (at least that's what I tell my kids).
There are interesting things happening with account abstraction, but one function I haven’t heard much about is transferring the ownership of a wallet from one user to another. There are a bunch of use cases where this could be useful, I'd like to share my thoughts on how this effects supply chain.
In my recent post about supply chain a friend replied in the comments that “I’ve come to the realization that big business doesn’t want that level of transparency, because transparency = accountability.”. To which my quick counter reply was “Being able to keep transactions confidential is key, but even this creates accountability - so we need an incentive that can outweigh that risk ”. I then suggested that this would be a topic for my next post, so here it is 
Does knowing make you accountable? What are the real motivations for supply chain transparency.
This is a drum I’ve been beating for many years now - In my opinion using decentralized networks to create trusted and controlled visibility into the supply chains that literally affect the lives of billions of people every day is inevitable; but we are not there yet…. In this post I summarize my latest thinking on the topic.
TLDR – Digital twins are for running simulations and optimizing for future events. Product tokens are for transferring claims against an asset (ownership, custody, etc) and recording the state of past events.
Often the topic of AI regarding blockchain comes up, often the topic is misguided…
A blockchain is not a learning system, it is not intelligent (smart contracts aren’t even that smart…). It’s more akin to a data historian, a network that maintains a state, and a record of all previous states. It does not adapt on its own or self optimize - if it did it would undermine the trusted execution.
Where is most of the effort going to be for enterprises to get on board with product tokenization for track & trace? It’s not the blockchain tech - while that part is cool, if we go with the assumption that any decentralized system worth building on needs to be open source and multi-purpose, it’s not going to be the enterprise’s role to develop or operate that network. It is however the enterprise’s role to lay out clear business requirements that can be used to build modular software (building blocks) to achieve lofty traceability-related use cases.
With product tokens we generate a bread crumb trail of metadata that is specific to a given product. In combination with the minting, transferring, and burning of claims on that token the metadata rounds out the full record of the products lineage and data.