Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) leverage blockchain technology to certify and transfer ownership of digital assets to individuals. NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain have garnered significant attention recently, with a trading volume of over $2 billion in Q1 2021 only. At the same time, established NFT solutions have low flexibility, limited scalability, and high transaction fees. These deficiencies make them impractical to use at a larger scale to manage digital assets. We present UniCon, a universal and scalable infrastructure for digital asset management. The key idea of UniCon is to track asset ownership in a tracking blockchain while making minimal assumptions on the capabilities of this blockchain. UniCon enables the exchange of asset ownership in any digital currency, unlike current NFT platforms. We devise a system architecture and build a prototype of UniCon. We use a scalable distributed ledger that is highly suitable for the tracking of asset ownership. Our prototype enables a decentralized ecosystem to manage and trade assets. @en

Creating content in the digital era has never beenso easy. However, there exists no framework inwhich artists can share, cooperate and transferuniversal content. We refer to the termuniversalas that allowing our architecture to manage contentboth from the physical and digital world. Currentplatforms are either centralized and sector-specificsuch as Netflix and Spotify, or decentralized.On the one hand, the centralized platforms havecontrol over both the data and the identity of theirusers. On the other hand, decentralized platformslack scalability and an identity layer. Our architec-ture expands current decentralized solutions witha more scalable and generic framework. This so-lution allows users, and their verified identities, topossess control over their data; share and exchangecontent, both from the physical and digital world;and get attribution and royalties for their work inany digital coin.