Earlier this week, version 0.0.5 of Chromawallet was released (here’s is Alex’s official announcement) and users have begun testing the creation and sending of colored assets (first on testnet, soon on mainnet).  A few adventurous people have sent 0.0008 BTC in fees related to Colored assets (you can look at Blockchain.info for a few here and there).

I received two interesting emails this week, the first is a use-case for Colored Coins from Mark:

I think a good use case is for stocks: so long as it’s for Class A common stock, no dividends, it’s a very uniform asset, already digitally-issued. If Google treasury (the issuer of Google stock) colored a coin, they are the final arbiter of whether a share is a share is a share, and I would trust them as the issuer of the coin. But what about proxies, splits, ugh…

Best, best use case is for foreign stocks to be registered this way: it’s still really cumbersome for a non-Brazilian investor, for example, to buy Petrobras on Brazil’s Bovespa market.

Good question, the potential is there, the technical side works.  Whether or not that these kind of companies are willing to try and adopt this method is another matter entirely — as are the legal issues of exchanging a security to different qualified investors (foreign, accredited, etc.).  JoinMyIPO, LTBcoin and BankToTheFuture are trying different approaches to this crowdequity opportunity.

DACs

I received an email from Gary who initially talked about alts, but is looking for he sees as long-term opportunities through DACs:

I don’t think its really about the currency, its the underlying technology and how it can be applied to Decentralised Autonomous Corporation, the project that O like that will be the front runner is the Ethereum project, the only problem with me is that how do O create a DAC? I could put it this way, you take a normal business process and convert that process into a DAC, is it possible, I think so. I did post a sort of DAC on the Ethereum forum, in regards to the production of electricity and had some good constructive comments, have a look when you have the time and let me know what you think. I don’t know if you have seen this new development in the US regarding Benefit Corporation:

In April 2010, Maryland became the first U.S. state to pass benefit corporation legislation

Typical major provisions of a benefit corporation are:

Purpose

• Shall create general public benefit
• Shall have right to name specific public benefit purposes (e.g. 50% profits back to community)
• The creation of public benefit is in the best interests of the benefit corporation

Unfortunately I am not a lawyer, so I’m not sure how DACs will be recognized in each jurisdiction.  Furthermore, just so that everyone is on the same page: no team has actually unveiled a working DAC/DAO — in fact, there is no real consensus of how to define a DAO/DAC/DACP.

That said, conceivably it is likely a matter of time (months, years?) before someone designs a DAO that can create the functionality that Gary is looking for.  If I hear anything about releases, I will definitely write about it.  However word of warning: a CAO may actually be more efficient and effective for internal uses (see Subledger.com discussed in Chapter 5), thus I suspect a DAO will not necessarily be the only player in town.