The Exchange Network: An Architecture for the Negotiation of Non-Repudiable Token Exchanges

Many use cases coming out of initiatives such as Industry 4.0 and Ubiquitous Computing require that systems be able to cooperate by negotiating about and agreeing on the exchange of arbitrary values. While solutions able to facilitate such negotiation exist, they tend to either be domain-specific or lack mechanisms for non-repudiation, which make them unfit for the heterogeneity and scale of many compelling applications. In this paper, we present the Exchange Network, a general-purpose and implementation-independent architecture for digital negotiation and non-repudiable exchanges of tokens, which are symbolic representations of arbitrary values. We consider the implications of implementing the architecture in three different ways, using a common database, a blockchain, and our own Signature Chain data structure, which we also describe. We demonstrate the feasibility of the architecture by outlining our own implementation of it and also describe a supply-chain scenario inspired by one transportation process at Volvo Trucks.