Why is exchange the most important idea? Well, without it, participants and assets have no purpose!

This seems like an excessively hyperbolic statement! However, if you think about it for a moment, participants only meaningfully exist in the sense that they exchange goods and services (collectively known as assets) with each other. If a participant does not exchange with another participant, they don't exist in any meaningful way. It's the same with assets—if they aren't exchanged between participants, then they don't exist in any meaningful way either. There's no point in an asset having a life cycle if it doesn't move between different participants, because the asset is private to a participant and serves no purpose in the business network outside the participant's private context.

Change, therefore, is the fundamental principle in business networks. When we think about exchange, transfers, commerce, buying, selling, agreement, and contracts, all of these motivational ideas are concerned with the business and the effects of change. Change gives the world of business motion and direction. The way we capture change is via a transaction. That's why transaction is the most important concept in a business network—it defines and records change—change of asset; change of asset ownership; change of participants. Whenever anything changes in a business network, there's a transaction to account for it.