eToroX develops code to tokenise assets on Libra blockchain

20th June 2019 – Facebook’s Libra project marks a seismic moment for global finance. As the dust begins to settle after Tuesday’s announcement, both the crypto and traditional finance industry are busy grappling with the challenges and opportunities presented by Libra.

eToroX Labs Blockchain Science team, comprising Chief Blockchain Scientist Dr. Omri Ross, Peter Emil Jensen, and Johannes Rude Jensen, was quick off the mark to investigate how eToro’s tokenized assets (and the technology behind them) would work on Libra’s initial prototype, and how well it suited the existing specification.

Dr. Omri Ross, eToro’s Chief Blockchain Scientist, comments: “The prototype of the Libra blockchain – the testnet – launched on Tuesday and is in beta mode until the launch in H1 2020. We were excited to explore a test implementation of eToro’s tokenized assets on Libra in Move IR.”

By exploring Libra’s capabilities, and using Move IR (the intermediate representation of what will eventually be the final programming language), they successfully managed to implement an initial version of eToros tokenized assets on the Libra network.

Using a previous specification targeting the Ethereum blockchain, the team wrote and executed a basic implementation for creating digital assets (tokenization capabilities) on Libra.

Top two takeaways:

1. In Move, resources (data structure types) cannot be moved or copied — an extremely constructive and beneficial capability, especially for digital assets, since it prevents accidental duplication and loss.
2. Contrary to other blockchain languages, Move does not allow publishing data on behalf of other users. Because of this, it requires users to acknowledge this beforehand, thereby giving users full control of which data is associated with them.

“We applaud the early initiatives of the Libra team in designing Move IR, and are excited to follow the development in the near future. The combination of the many qualities associated with the Rust programming language and the HotStuff consensus algorithm is a promising direction in a rapidly maturing industry.” concludes Dr. Ross.

Created in 2019, eToroX Labs is a team at the forefront of blockchain exploration and innovation. Led by Dr. Ross, it acts as an internal innovation unit within eToro tasked with the research and development of infrastructure for the representation of assets and the execution of trade processes on blockchain infrastructure.

Read the full report of eToroX’s Libra implementation on Github.