Introduction
Open Kits are purpose built APIs that make building open apps much easier.
Open Economy is one of the Open Kits for quickly integrating programmable currencies, points and other assets on your website or mobile app.
Behind this easy to use API is a blockchain network called “The Open Application Network” as well as smart contracts we’ve built to make it easy for you to program, deploy and move assets by simply calling a function on the API.
At this point, it’s important to make you acquaintant with what we mean by Assets.
What is an Asset
As per Wikipedia, Asset is “an economic resource, or something of value”. Similarly, according to Merriam-Webster, Asset is “An item of value owned”.
In the sphere of Open Apps too, Assets have the same meaning - a digital item of value that is owned by a user. This digital item can have different forms, and uses for different scenarios. For example, in the case of Open Apps built around Open Economy, an asset can be a token that users earn on the Open App. These assets belong to the users, even if the generating Open App goes out of business, the users continue to hold these assets, and can use them wherever they’re applicable and accepted.
Because the assets are held by the users, they play an important role in making sure that the users have control and autonomy over what they get back from a service.
Assets play an important role in an Open App ecosystem. The understanding of what’s an asset is important as a developer, to better design experiences for your users.
To learn more about digital assets, you can refer to our Knowledge Base article on Digital Assets