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Asset behaviors are the rules the creator of a token or NFT has configured, defining how those assets can be created, destroyed, and moved – and who can do those things. On Radix, these behaviors aren’t buried in smart contract code. They’re readable by the Radix Wallet so users can see exactly how the assets they hold behave – there are no secret backdoors or unseen loopholes.
Radix is built differently to provide a dramatically better developer and user experience, and one of the most important differences is that tokens and NFTs on Radix work much more intuitively compared to how they do on other blockchain networks.
Assets on other networks
Tokens on Ethereum (and virtually every other layer-1 network) are not really tokens as you’d imagine them. On Ethereum, each type of “token” is actually a smart contract that keeps a record of balances against a list of wallet addresses that “hold” that token. Data inside the smart contract says “this address holds 50 USDC and that address holds 1,000 USDC” – no tokens actually sit in a wallet.
Assets designed like this carry many risks. Firstly, it means that developers need to know a complex smart contract language to create their own tokens, and can easily make mistakes. It also means that anyone who can’t read a smart contract has no idea how the token they are holding behaves. There’s no easy way to know if the assets you’re holding can be frozen in your account or if someone can just take them from your wallet without warning.
Assets on Radix act like real assets
Assets on Radix are created differently. They act more like physical coins do in real life. This is made possible by the Radix Engine, a custom-built asset-oriented virtual machine. With Radix Engine, tokens on Radix actually sit in your account, as individual digital entities. When you transfer a token from your account to your friend’s account, you are not saying “decrease my balance by 5 USDC and increase their balance by 5 USDC”. At your request, the Radix Network literally moves 5 digital USDC tokens from your account to theirs.
The Radix way of creating assets makes designing DeFi dApps far easier for developers but it also means users can benefit from something called asset behaviors. They can tell you exactly what anyone can do to a token or NFT.
When an issuer wants to create an asset, they set the rules for how it will behave by selecting from a set of universal and intuitive rules. These rules are based on how physical assets work in the real world. They state clearly who is able to create and destroy the asset, who can move them from place to place, and who can change any metadata associated with them. So when that asset is brought to life and starts moving through the real world, the Radix Network itself ensures those rules are always correctly enforced – and it means users are fully aware of the nature of the assets they hold.
So on Radix, if someone’s designed a token that can be inflated to worthlessness or an NFT whose metadata can be changed unexpectedly, we make that clear, in everyday language, inside the Radix Wallet. It’s common-sense labeling that keeps your assets under your control.
Further reading:
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