What actually is a digital item on a blockchain?

A digital item in its simplest form has some form of media (image, Giff, audio, etc), with some data describing what it is and what it should do.

The blockchain bit comes in by recording anything you want and displaying this history for anyone to see, such as who has owned it, when it was last serviced, and what the temperature was at certain coordinates.

Every time an item is updated, it creates a new block containing the new information and references the previous block behind it. (This is why it is called a blockchain because it is just a chain of blocks). For example, if I sold my item and gave it to someone, this transfer of ownership (and other details) is recorded as part of the transaction and recorded onto the chain.

What items can I create?

With the above recipe, you can add any type of media you like, any traits (which can be anything from numerical to text records), and you can store their history and how they change over time on a blockchain.

From this, you can make anything a digital item with a recorded history. Shipping containers, vehicles, luxury goods, items in games, government spending, voting records - anything that you want to create a public record for that can't be changed.

What can an item do?

We've built a few ways in which a digital item can behave, and we refer to these as "Characteristics" that you can choose to add to your items or not:

Item traits

Add and customise properties for your digital items. Traits give you an opportunity to customise anything you want to your asset.

These can be numerical or text, so you can really make anything you want. Names, dates, locations, coordinates, serial numbers; anything.

Item characteristics:

Evolving Assets

This enables:

• New traits to be added to an item,
• Existing traits to be removed from an item,
• Existing traits to be changed,

The evolve function is handled through the metadata on the item which links either to AWS or IPFS (up to you depending on what you'd prefer).

Timed Assets

An item that will self-destruct after a specified period.

You can customise by days, hours, and minutes.

Favourite for seasonal engagement and loyalty programmes

Burnable

This item can be destroyed.

This is great for consumables.

Earn by Owning

Players will earn currency by owning this asset. These rules can be customised when selecting earn by owning.