Designing a blockchain solutions from scratch provides the possibility to implement certain special functionalities into the blockchain. One such a functionality can be an internal exchange that makes possible to exchange different internal or even external assets. For an internal asset exchange to be the fundamental part of a blockchain protocol, we need the following elements:
- an asset - account based system is more practical than an UTXO based one.
- each account has to be associated with an asset type that can be transferred or traded.
- for the sake of simplicity, one account should contain only one type of asset, so account type should be decided at the initialization and it should be immutable.
- transfer transaction should be extended, similarly to a standard case transfer transaction should be signed by the private key of the account from which we would like to transfer the asset. However, the target account must have the same asset type as the from account.
- there might be some further consideration if certain asset types have different monetary policies, like different digits, different monetary supply, and so on.
- there should be a special trading transaction which in a simplest case offers a certain amount asset and requires a certain amount of other asset. There might be some further parameter, like time-frame of the transaction in which it can be executed, upper or lower "price" limit of the transactions. The trade transaction is signed by the private key of the initiating account.
- in mining not only the transfer transactions are executed but the different trading transactions are paired. If a valid pair is found, they are put into the block and the effect of the two transactions are applied to the state. So in this sense mining here also means finding a set of paired trade transactions.
