Masterkey is a method to record and commodify any event imaginable. Be it artistic expression, scientific discovery, cultural artifact or a historic moment, what qualifies as an event is decided by the individual willing to pay the necessary fee in order to create an anchoring point of the event on the most secure public ledger there is (bitcoin ledger).
The fundamental value of a distributed public ledger is the secure environment it provides that allows people to publish certain information without trusting any third party. Anyone can view the recorded information and nobody can modify it. The "objectivity" of a distributed public ledger is measured by the amount of resources the attacker has to use in order to undermine its' integrity. Information that has been written into the ledger is automatically timestamped.
Within the masterkey framework digital assets become more concrete representation of events because they are more easily authenticated than physical objects. Counterparty is a second layer protocol that resides on top of bitcoin that enables the creation of digital assets. The process of authentication without the need to trust any third party is built into the counterparty protocol.