Technological Characteristic of Futures Based on Virtual Assets

A virtual asset is a type of asset which does not have a material representation, although its value is reflected in a real currency. Due to their nature, the price of digital assets is usually highly volatile, especially with futures, which are derivative financial contracts. This is the most important contributing factor to the problem of the low usability of digital-based contracts in enterprise operations.Previously existing virtual assets included photography, logos, illustrations, animations, audiovisual media, etc. However, virtually all of such assets required a third-party platform for exchange to currency. The necessity of having a trusted by both sides mediator greatly limited the ease of use, and ultimately restricted the number of such transactions. Still, popularity of digital assets only grew, as evidenced by an explosive growth of software applications in the 2000s, as well as blockchain-based asset space in the 2010s.The newest and most promising solution developed is based on cryptoassets. Underlying usage of block- chain technology for the transactions checking and storage ensures clarity in virtual assets’ value history. Smart contracts written for the Ethereum platform, as an example, provide a highly trustful way of express- ing predefined conditions of a certain transaction. This allows safe and calculated enterprise usage, and also eliminates the need of having a mutually trusted third-party. The transactions are fully automated and happen at the same time as the pre-defined external conditions are met.Ethereum was chosen as an exemplary platform due to its high flexibility and amount of existing development. Even now, further advancements are being explored by its founder and community. Besides Ether, it is also used nоn-fungible tokens, decentralized finance, and enterprise blockchain solutions. Another important point is how much more nature friendly it is compared to main competitors, due to energy-efficiency of the mining process, enforced by the platform itself. This makes it ideal for responsible usage as well as further research.This article explores the digital assets usage, as well as explains cryptoassets technological background, in order to highlight the recent developments in the area of futures based on virtual assets, using certain Ether implementation as an example, which offers perpetual futures.