ERC721, Sir Tim, and Saying Hello To A Tokenized World

“Innovate, create and initiate the next technological transformation, that we cannot yet imagine”

My new passport arrived yesterday:

… and it asked me to immediately sign my name. Unfortunately, it has been a long time since anyone asked me to sign anything. So I scribbled something and moved on. The whole concept of a paper document and in signing something with a wet signature just seems to out-of-date. Why can’t I get an electronic PDF which is digital signed or a trusted version that sits in my wallet?

Recently, too, I purchased a new home (by the sea), and my conveyancer asked for my deeds. I basically had no idea where these were, and who had them. I then scrambled around the house looking for something that looked like a legal document and found some pieces of paper that seemed to define the deeds to the house. I scanned them as a PDF, and send it. “Is this it?”, “Yes. Thanks”. Pweh! In this modern time, you would think we had moved on a bit in a meaningful digital way, and where we start to create a more trusted digital world for buying something and for there to be electronic versions of the key documents we need.

Meet NFT … the copyright protector of the future?

And so we slowly move towards a more trusted digital world, and where your digital signature will have more standing than your wet signature. This will bring in a world of digital tokens, and which can be bought and sold, and which can truly prove ownership of something. For me, when I buy a car, I fill in a piece of paper or go online to register for the sale. My only proof that I own the car is that there is a database somewhere which now registers my name and address against the car. But in a tokenized world, we can transfer ownership of the crypto asset through the digital signing process, and where the previous owner of a car uses their private key to assess the car to me. I prove to everyone that I now own it using my public key. That all works well for physical assets, but what about software…