Lab Name

Open Tokenized Asset Standard (OTAS)

Short Description

A LF Decentralized Trust lab contributing open source smart contract reference implementations for tokenized financial instruments — providing the industry a neutral, auditable on-chain foundation while platform-level orchestration, compliance, and lifecycle management remain out of scope.

Scope of Lab

Mission Alignment

Advance LF Decentralized Trust’s vision of open, interoperable decentralized infrastructure by contributing auditable, protocol-agnostic smart contract primitives for tokenized assets — establishing a community-governed on-chain baseline that institutions can build upon or integrate with production platforms.

What Is and Is Not in Scope

The lab’s open source contribution is strictly scoped to smart contract reference implementations — the on-chain token definitions, base behaviors, and interface standards. The following are explicitly out of scope for open contribution: compliance workflow engines, metadata propagation logic, regulatory reporting pipelines, lifecycle orchestration, and platform-level integrations.

Core Activities

  • Survey existing on-chain token standards across relevant execution environments to identify gaps in interoperability and base type coverage.
  • Establish a minimal, protocol-neutral smart contract interface standard encompassing token base type classifications, core operational behaviors, and event schema specifications. The scope of this standard shall initially reference, but not be exclusively limited to, the Ethereum and SUI blockchain protocols.
  • Develop and publish open source reference implementations across three illustrative asset classes — sovereign bonds, tokenized deposits, and IoT-linked assets.
  • Produce a Technical Specification documenting the interface standard, implementation patterns, and integration surface for production platforms.
  • Develop all smart contract artifacts to the LF Decentralized Trust community under open source licensing.

What Remains Proprietary

The reference implementations are intentionally minimal — they demonstrate the standard, not deliver it. Platform capabilities including compliance lifecycle management, metadata propagation, multi-rail settlement orchestration, and institutional reporting are not replicated and represent the value layer that production systems provide.

Relation to LF Decentralized Trust

This lab operates under LF Decentralized Trust. All outputs are contributed under open source licensing: Community Specification License 1.0, and smart contract code under the Apache License 2.0. Findings may be of interest to Hyperledger Fabric and Besu as illustrative execution environments. OpenAssets participates as a founding contributor, bringing institutional deployment experience while ensuring all outputs remain openly governed and community-owned.

This lab operates under LF Decentralized Trust. Findings may be of interest to Hyperledger Fabric and Besu as illustrative execution environments. OpenAssets participates as a founding contributor, bringing institutional deployment experience while ensuring all outputs remain openly governed and community-owned.

Expected Deliverables

  • Research Report — a comparative survey of existing tokenization and post-trade settlement frameworks, identifying gaps and community recommendations for open standards.
  • Develop production-grade smart contracts demonstrating post-trade settlement primitives across onchain and hybrid scenarios, for research and educational purposes. While initially scoped as prototypes, outputs may inform or evolve into production-ready implementations subject to community governance and institutional validation.
  • Draft Technical Specification — proposed open standard schemas, token base types, settlement behaviors, and metadata requirements, contributed as a community draft.
  • Community Whitepaper — research findings, open questions, and suggested directions for post-trade token framework adoption, with no prescriptive or regulatory guidance implied.

Initial Committers

https://github.com/pv-suren https://github.com/pv-sarvesh https://github.com/pv-somyaditya

Sponsor

  • https://github.com/manolisliolios - Manos Liolios (SUI Foundation Mysten Labs)
  • https://github.com/dmitri-perelman - Dmitri Perelman (SUI Foundation Mysten Labs)

Pre-existing repository

None

Reference

Associated Mentorship Proposal (Issue #88):

OTAS - Researching Composable Token Primitives for Post-Trade Clearing, Settlement, and Compliance on Distributed Ledgers

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