The proposal of new Ethereum request for comments for supporting fractional ownership of non-fungible tokens

Abstract

During the last couple of years, non-fungible tokens became the most prominent implementation of blockchain technology apart from cryptocurrencies. This is mainly due to their recent association with digital art, but the application of non-fungible tokens has been in the focus of researchers since the appearance of Blockchain 2.0. It was usually tightly coupled with the research on possible applications of blockchain technology in some real-life applications, such as land administration, healthcare, or supply chain management. Since the initial release of the Ethereum blockchain in 2015, until 2022, more than 44 million smart contracts have been created, and out of those that are still active, more than 70% are based on some prominent templates. In the Ethereum blockchain, the creation of nonfungible tokens is usually based on Ethereum Request for Comments 721. In this paper, the authors are proposing the creation of a new standard that would support fractional ownership of non-fungible tokens. Fractional ownership is necessary so non-fungible tokens and blockchain technology could be applied to an even wider number of use cases. This paper also presents an example of a possible implementation of the newly proposed standard in the Solidity programming language.