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How the ACTUS Protocol components work together |
A subset of the contracts, the ACTUS Engines and the ACTUS Core, implement the ACTUS financial contract standard. Its main features are creation of asset schedules from ACTUS contract terms and computing state progression. The remaining contracts facilitate asset registration, connection to external data (oracles), tokenization and other aspects related to the lifecycle of an asset on Ethereum.
The SDK serves as a wrapper around the ACTUS Protocol smart contract system. It has handy convenience functions that abstract away complexity of formatting terms, generating schedules and interacting with contracts.
To understand how the ACTUS Protocol components work together, let's go through a couple of exemplary tasks and discuss them using the illustration below. The tasks have been simplified for this purpose but they nevertheless should give you a good general feeling of the inner workings.
When issuing an asset a transaction calling the initialize method of the Asset Actor containing the asset terms, ownership information and the address of an ACTUS Engine. The exact parameters vary slightly between the contract types.
Progressing through the lifecycle of the asset is done via the progress method of the Asset Actor. It retrieves the terms and the current state of the asset from the Asset Registry and uses the ACTUS Engines to derives the requirements for the state transition of the asset. For example if a payment is necessary to progress the asset's state, it is executed by the Asset Actor (assuming allowances were set at time of execution).
Market Data Providers are whitelisted Ethereum accounts, e.g. decentralized oracles or trusted third parties that can publish data to the Data Registry using the publishDataPoint method. They provide external data points needed for example for rate resets, determining the market value of underlying assets.