Open problems

What is covered, and what is not

Software covers four steps of a tokenized issuance. Regulated partners cover four more. The remaining seven belong to parties you appoint yourself. Knowing which is which before you start is the difference between a project that reaches production and one that is rebuilt.

Coverage

Fifteen steps, three kinds of responsibility.

Read this as a checklist rather than an argument. Each row is something that has to happen for a real issuance to settle and for the money to arrive, and each is performed by exactly one of three kinds of party.

04Technology
04Regulated partner
07Yours to appoint
StepPerformed byNote
Establishing title to the assetYours to appointCounsel in the jurisdiction where the asset sits. No software participates in this.
Forming the holding vehicleYours to appointFormation agent and counsel. The choice of jurisdiction governs everything downstream.
Drafting the interest and its termsYours to appointCounsel. What the holder is buying, what they are owed, and on what conditions.
Custody of the underlying assetYours to appointA licensed custodian or trustee, appointed by you, in a place that recognises the arrangement.
Maintaining the authoritative registerYours to appointA transfer agent or registrar where the role is reserved. The ledger can support it; it cannot assume it.
Creating the token and its asset modelTechnologyContracts across several virtual machines, with the backing recorded alongside the units.
Enforcing transfer restrictionsTechnologyThe eligibility test travels with the asset, on every network where the token can refuse a transfer.
Reconciling supply against attested reserveTechnologyContinuous comparison of what exists across networks against what has been attested to back it.
Verifying the business (KYB)Regulated partnerPerformed by the regulated institution providing the accounts. Presented through one interface.
Accounts that receive local currencyRegulated partnerIssued by a licensed payment or e-money institution. The software is the distributor.
Conversion to and from stablecoinsRegulated partnerA regulated activity performed by the partner, at the partner's price.
Cross-border transfer of the stablecoinTechnologyA public network. Minutes, a published fee, and a record both sides can verify.
Payout into the beneficiary's bankRegulated partnerLocal rails at the destination, through an institution permitted to reach them.
Introducing the offering to investorsYours to appointA licensed distributor or placement agent where the offering reaches beyond people you already know.
Ongoing reporting and supervisionYours to appointFilings, disclosures and answers to your regulator. These follow the instrument, not the format.

The technology rows are implemented at boli.technology and the partner rows are reached through skerry.xyz, which presents one interface over institutions that hold the licences. Neither holds a licence itself. The seven rows marked yours remain yours in every design we know of, including ours.

Unsolved

Seven questions the field has not answered.

These are not gaps in one product. They are open across the field, and progress on any of them would change what is buildable for everyone.

01The ledger as the registerOnly a handful of jurisdictions have amended company and securities law so that an entry on a distributed ledger is the legal record rather than a copy of one. Everywhere else the off-chain register remains authoritative and the token is a mirror — which reintroduces exactly the reconciliation problem tokenization was meant to remove.
02Portable eligibilityA holder verified by one institution generally has to be verified again by the next. There is no accepted way to carry proof that someone is eligible to hold a restricted interest from one venue to another without handing over the underlying documents again.
03Facts about the worldA token can prove its own history perfectly and still be a claim on something that no longer exists or is worth less than stated. Binding an off-chain fact — a building standing, a cargo loaded, a forest intact — to an on-chain record, in a way a supervisor will accept, is unsolved in the general case.
04One asset, several networksThe same economic interest issued on more than one network can drift: units are created on one and redeemed on another, bridged representations are double-counted, and no single chain holds the whole picture. Continuous reconciliation against one attested reserve is a partial answer and is what the platform layer works on.
05Secondary liquidityMost tokenized interests cannot lawfully trade on an open venue, so they are issued and then sit. Building venues that are both liquid and authorised, in more than one country at once, is the largest commercial gap in the field.
06Corridor coverageStablecoin settlement is only as useful as the currencies and countries an institution can actually reach at each end. Coverage is uneven, changes without notice, and is the most common reason a working design cannot be used for a particular payment.
07What happens if the software stopsIf a technology provider fails, the register, the restriction logic and the reconciliation have to survive it. Designs that publish their records openly and keep them readable without the provider are better placed here than designs that do not, and very few state their answer explicitly.
Work in progress

Where we are putting effort, and what it will not fix.

Four of the seven questions above are ones we are actively building against. The other three need law, licensed venues and accepted standards rather than better software, and we treat them as constraints to design around rather than problems to route past.

Against 04
Reconciliation across networks

Supply read on each network an asset declares, bridge routes netted at the source so a unit crossing one is counted once, and the total compared every epoch against the attested reserve. Issuance beyond that reserve is refused rather than reported.

Against 01 and 07
A record that outlives the provider

An append-only, publicly readable record of what was issued, what backs it and who attested to the backing — so that the register can be reconstructed from published data rather than from one company’s database.

Against 03
Measured rather than asserted backing

Allowing part of an asset’s stated backing to come from hardware-attested measurement, published with its uncertainty and held open to challenge before it counts, instead of from a number the issuer states.

Against 06
One interface, many corridors

Presenting verification, accounts, conversion and payout as one flow while the institutions underneath change, so that adding a corridor is a partner integration rather than a rebuild for the customer.

Not ours to fix
02 · 05 · and most of 01

Portable eligibility needs an accepted standard and mutual recognition. Secondary liquidity needs authorised venues. Ledger-as-register needs legislation. We can be ready for each; we cannot supply them.

If you are planning an issuance or a corridor and want to know which rows of the map you already have covered, the papers and briefings go further into the structures, and the two implementations are linked from every page.