User Issued Assets

"In addition to the aforementioned market pegged assets, BitShares allows individuals and companies to create and issue their own tokens for anything they can imagine. The potential use cases for so called user-issued assets (UIA) are innumerable. On the one hand, UIAs can be used as simple event tickets deposited on the customers mobile phone to pass the entrance of a concert. On the other hand, they can be used for crowd funding, ownership tracking or even to sell equity of a company in form of stock.

Obviously, the regulations that apply to each kind of token vary widely and are often different in every jurisdiction. Hence, BitShares comes with tools that allow issuers to remain compliant with all applicable regulations when issuing assets assuming regulators allow such assets in the first place."

Market Pegged Assets

"A crypto-currency, with the properties and advantages of Bitcoin, that is capable of maintaining price parity with a globally adopted currency (e.g. U.S. dollar), has high utility for convenient and censorship resistant commerce. This can be achieved by BitShares’ market pegged assets (MPA), a new type of freely traded digital asset whose value is meant to track the value of a conventional underlying asset by means of contracts for difference (CFD).

A SmartCoin (synonym for MPA) is a crypto-currency that always has 100% or more of its value backed by the BitShares core currency (BTS), to which they can be converted at any time, as collateral in a CFD.

What makes MPAs unique is that they are free from counterparty risk even though they resemble a CFD backed by collateral. This is achievable by letting the network itself (implemented as a software protocol) be responsible for securing the collateral and performing settlements as will be described in more detail below.

This is a subset of the available market pegged assets:
BitUSD
BitCNY
BitEUR
BitGOLD
…"

Introduction

"The decentralized exchange (further denoted simply as the DEX) allows for direct exchange of digital goods traded in the BitShares ecosystem.

A decentralized exchange has a very particular set of advantages over traditional centralized exchanges and we would like to address some of them briefly below. Although the BitShares DEX comes with all of them, it is up to the reader and customer to leverage those features in full or only partially.
Separation of Powers: There is no reason why the same entity needs to be responsible for issuing IOUs and for processing the order book. In BitShares, order matching is performed by the protocol, which is unaware of implications concerning the involved assets.
Global Unified Order Book: Since BitShares is global, anybody with an internet access can use the DEX for trading. This brings the world’s liquidity to a single order book for decentralized trading.
Trade Almost Anything: The BitShares DEX is asset agnostic. Hence you can trade at any pair. While some pairs may end up with low liquidity, such as SILVER:GOLD, other pairs such as USD:EUR for FOREX trading will see huge volume.
No Limits: The BitShares protocol is unable to limit your trading experience.
Decentralized: The DEX is decentralized across the globe. This not only means that there is no single point of failure, but it also implies that the BitShares exchange is open for trading 24/7 because it’s always daytime somewhere.
Secure: Your funds and trades are secured with industry-grade elliptic curve cryptography. No one will be able to access your funds unless you let them. To further strengthen the security, we allow our customers to setup escrow and multi-signature schemes.
Fast: In contrast to other decentralized networks, the BitShares DEX allows for real-time trading and is only limited by the speed of light and the size of the planet.
Provable Order Matching Algorithm: What makes the BitShares DEX unique is the provable order matching algorithm. Given a set of orders, you will always be able to provably verify that these orders have been matched properly.
Collateralized Smartcoins: One of the biggest features of BitShares are its smartcoins such as bitUSD, bitEUR, bitCNY, and others. For the sake of convenience, these assets are denotes simply as USD, EUR, CNY, etc. in the wallet. These digital tokens represent the same value as their underlaying physical asset. Hence 1 USD in this wallet is worth $1 and can be redeemed as such. Any of these tokens is backed by BitShares’ company shares (BTS) being locked up as collateral and being available for settlement at its current price."