MarketCoin: an Algorand Standard Asset

"You can create your own money to share with others, using computers? Wow!"

I attended a very good introduction to the concepts of Private Tokens and Smart Contracts: the USI Winter School course on Writing Smart Contracts (WSC) 2022 facilitated by Prof. Peter Gruber.

Algorand is a great technology that solves many of the problems of Ethereum. It's fast, easy to use and -most importantly- transaction fees are very low, which provides an incentive to its use.

I think Algorand will survive the crypto nuclear winter of Summer 2022 and gain market acceptance in the future.

The creation of a private token by any user - an Algorand Standard Asset (ASA) - allows anyone to mint their tokens for any purpose you might see fit: running your own economy with your users, as means of exchange to others that might want to use your currency, as tip, loyalty points, as NFTs of any number of creative projects, or even to replace the fiat currency of a country if you have the gravitas to do it (/smirk)

MARKETCOIN token was created as part of the work for PROJECT NINE. - it is hosted in the Algorand Testnet, so it has no real monetary value.

How an ASA looks like

As blockchain is of public access, the information that describes this asset is freely available online in Algoexplorer. The ASA is a dictionary of keys and values with child nodes (also with keys and values) - Like other JSON structures, numerical int values do not need to be surrounded in quotes.

MARKETCOIN= { 'index': 88504379, 'params': {'creator': 'ERSFRCT6VTLUVKQWER2P4UBVX6KNAHKVV2ARBLW7KNDREVDQHQ2EYSC7FI', 'decimals': 2, 'default-frozen': False, 'manager': 'ERSFRCT6VTLUVKQWER2P4UBVX6KNAHKVV2ARBLW7KNDREVDQHQ2EYSC7FI', 'name': 'MARKETCOIN', 'name-b64': 'TUFSS0VUQ09JTg==', 'reserve': 'ERSFRCT6VTLUVKQWER2P4UBVX6KNAHKVV2ARBLW7KNDREVDQHQ2EYSC7FI', 'total': 100000000, 'unit-name': 'MKTCOIN', 'unit-name-b64': 'TUtUQ09JTg==', 'url': 'www.carloslabs.com/marketcoin', 'url-b64': 'd3d3LmNhcmxvc2xhYnMuY29tL21hcmtldGNvaW4='} }

In most ASAs the "creator", "manager" and "reserve" will not have the same Algorand address..

As MARKETCOIN is for testing and educational purposes this is not a problem, but in real applications of monetary value, this implies that fiduciary governance of the ASA does not exist. One address controls everything: there is no board of governors for the ASA.

There will also be fields in some ASAs called "clawback" and "freeze" - these point to an Algorand wallet address that can stop or revert transactions. Use your best judgement when investing in those assets