Blockchain startup Blockstream announced a new custom token creation platform on Monday.

The firm has officially launched the Issued Assets (IA) program on its bitcoin-backed Liquid sidechain, allowing users to create their own tokenized assets, according to a press release. These tokens can represent any sort of financial instrument, including fiat currency, crypto assets or attested assets (such as gold coins), as well as more novel types.

Users can also adopt Confidential Assets to enable private transactions between blockchain assets, ensuring only the parties involved in a transaction will know the asset type and value being traded.

Moreover, users can conduct atomic swaps between bitcoin and IA that include altcoins, meaning that a bitcoin can be exchanged for an asset in a single transaction without using intermediaries. Finalizing a transaction takes less than 2 minutes, the startup said.

Blockstream previewed the tool at CoinDesk's Consensus 2018 conference in New York, demonstrating how the Liquid platform could be used to issue five different types of IA, representing physical goods.

In the demonstration, these assets included shirts and hoodies – and these tokens were randomly sent to attendees' paper wallets. Each paper wallet had a public key, and the owners were able to redeem the tokens for each asset it contained. After the physical gifts were redeemed, the digital assets were destroyed.

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