Microsoft, Ethereum Group Launch Token-Building Kit for Enterprises

The Enterprise Ethereum Alliance and Microsoft have corralled the major blockchain providers behind a new project to help businesses design and create the right sort of crypto tokens for their particular needs.

"We are doing this for the greater common good. Standardizing tokens across all networks could hold the key to one of the greatest economic opportunities in modern history."

Gray said his team would have many rather repetitive conversations trying to describe tokens and the particular properties desired by users - "We would use analogies like airline tickets a lot" - and how these requirements relate to existing blockchain platforms.

"The idea is to use a workshop with business people to describe a token completely that services their business requirements. That token itself is composed of reusable components so another group can use those same components to define a slightly different token without redefining all the things that initial group did - so it creates this framework."

In practical terms, Gray said a business user or consortium can "Grab a non-fungible token and drag it over and then start from a pallet of behaviors, drag those behaviors," as they would drag an icon on a screen.

The result, he said, is that a business person can create a token visually using a design tool that does not involve writing any code whatsoever, and allows them to then say to developers, "I want one of these."

Gray said his team has been exploring ways to use GitHub so that these certain business requirements can be matched to stored metadata and "Mapped" to specific blockchain implementations.

"An individual [token] behavior could point to a snippet of code for a particular platform, i.e. DAML for some particular behavior would link me to a particular piece of DAML code, or the same for Solidity, or Chaincode."

Judging from the cross-blockchain support the idea is getting, others in the space have also been having repeated conversations trying to define tokens.

R3 co-founder and token tsar Todd McDonald added: "The initiative represents a new and innovative way for the industry to collaborate on defining a token taxonomy that is appropriate for any enterprise-grade blockchain technology."