Data is everywhere. It surrounds us and binds us. Not just this crude silicon matter. You must feel the data around you. Between the phone, the tablet, the router. Everywhere yes - even between you and me. It is the fuel of the Information Age - the clue is in the name. It is fought over, traded, jealously protected, actively harvested and frequently stolen. 

It is, as the AI wars begin, the fundamental resource of value,  alongside energy and compute. It’s estimated that an astonishing 403 million terabytes of data is produced by society per day, and all of it is up for grabs. 

Its collection is also currently monopolized by the Big Tech companies who have the means and method to steal a march on society in attempts to take it all for themselves and seize the modern world’s means of production. Regulation is woefully inadequate to stop this unfair competition and, by this point, it’s unlikely to catch up in time to stop the corporate overreach - even if the government wanted to (which it doesn’t). 

The internet’s evolution has taken it from a communion of equals participating in free connection and exchange to a centralized walled garden where, to enter, you must give up everything. Data privacy and the importance of sovereign data is vastly misunderstood by almost every end user. To most, it just means protection of their personal information and activity online. This, of course, is an essential right we have too easily squandered, and this is a core reason why data privacy is so important. 

Yet it’s so much more than that. Data is the now underlying resource behind capitalism and by extension society itself. It’s how machines work. It’s how software works. It’s how the internet works. Every click, every sensor, every operation both relies upon and produces data to function at all. 

Every Sector Needs to Change

Examples? Data is everywhere, and Source Network creates utility and function in every sector. We are the source of resistance in the data wars.

Personal data, behavioral data, industrial output data, scientific research data, environmental data, training data for AI, military data, financial data, health data, government operational data, cultural archive data. All aspects and activity of human life is now encoded in 1s and 0s, the digital weave emitted from the collective loom of our shared endeavor and our very existence. Let’s break it down.

Personal Data like that used in location tracking, social media, ad-targeting, and PII can be better protected and individual’s privacy better maintained in the panoptic world. The behavior data of those users can be properly retained within the apps that use them, and not have their clicks, likes and dwell time gorged on by data brokers. 

Scientific research data which can be shared effortlessly between researchers on a grand scale without compromising the ethics of sharing that data, meaning greater collaboration and fast advances in technology and understanding. Industrial data like that funneled through IoT devices, supply chains, sensor data - boosting automation and optimization in manufacturing. 

Environmental data including better latency for collection of climate metrics, satellite imagery, and energy usage by individuals and institutions - creating better ESG strategies and innovations in sustainability. AI training data that can be ethically sourced and properly retained as we build the models that will define the future. 

Government data including better operation and resilience for military systems, better control and protection over government records, censuses and tax receipts. Health data that better protects user privacy while allowing for greater advances in medical science. Financial data like banking transactions, credit records, crypto wallets - securing this sensitive information and creating quicker processes that overcome the siloed and non-interoperable nature of the sector. 

This is not even an exhaustive list. The opportunity in distributed data management is the opportunity created by the entire internet itself.

The Ambition to Change Everything

Source Network’s ambitions then extend far beyond the limited scope of simply protecting end user data - even though of course it does that too. Our tools are an antidote to the demands of the Information Age. A way to distribute data management, restore sovereignty to individuals and local communities, and create a new paradigm around how all these different types of data are stored, processed, exchanged, operated on, and shared. To stop not just our individual lives but our entire society from being cannibalized and processed by tech oligarchs who, if it isn’t clear already, do not have humanity’s best interests at heart.

Source Network’s tools rebalance the power disparity between small companies and individuals by restoring the ability for them to compete in the new reality of competition over data and to capture more of the value they produce for themselves. It restores data sovereignty to start ups over their applications and the data they need to function. It lets them break free from using centralized environments and servers to power their services, and it lets them enshrine privacy for their users, now and forever. 

Our tools don’t demand ideological purity, either - because they neatly integrate with any existing stack and function perfectly well within already established centralized environments. It’s a free hit for a better future - and one developers can start using to gradually assume more sovereignty over their data. 

As we’ve said many times before, however, it’s not just ideological concerns that drive us, but practical ones. By properly distributing data management and powering Local Edge functionality, we can increase resilience, reduce latency, boost efficiency, and extend the utility of the computers that make our world go around. It’s not just about creating a better world, it’s about creating better systems for that world to work.

How Source Network’s Tools Work

So how do Source Network’s tools deliver this? DefraDB is a P2P database built with IPLD that uses CRDTs to ensure seamless and conflict free synchronization across distributed nodes. It handles the lifecycle of data from creation to deletion and allows for the querying, sharing and processing of that data in a fully distributed manner. It’s perfect for software running on local edge devices and ideal for applications that need resilient functionality even in semi-offline environments, real-time collaboration and usage of data, and which benefit from acquiring absolute data sovereignty. 

LensVM is a distributed data transformation tool that means different data types and schema originating from various edge devices (which may have different manufacturers) can be handled by DefraDB seamlessly, and means heterogeneous data can be compatible for use within a decentralized architecture - and also ensures data that currently exists on centralized platforms can be integrated. 

The Orbis Secrets Management Engine is powered by threshold cryptography and proxy re-encryption and maintains security by establishing Secret Rings. Thus, access to data is only available to the appropriate parties and no single actor can unilaterally decrypt data. Finally, SourceHub, our trust protocol, creates transparent trust auditing that means data managed by DefraDB has not been tampered with and creates audit trails for compliance and data integrity. SourceHub also provides the foundation for consistent access-control policy enforcement over all the data managed by DefraDB.

Not One Industry, Every Industry

Our tools aren’t just for a single industry, or a single purpose. They are for all industries that rely on data - i.e every single one. Source Network creates better data efficiency, sharing and sovereignty through the interconnected systems that we rely on to advance the human race itself. Local edge, distributed computing, sovereign digital utilities, end user privacy, and the simple act of letting computers talk to one another, and to us, without any intermediaries watching, controlling, and stealing our every move. That’s our ambition, to feel the data flow through us, and to overthrow the evil empires that - without our resistance - may prove to be our ultimate end.