Source Network’s overarching mission is to establish new paradigms of data sovereignty and data privacy in the systems that underpin our global digital economy. It’s about relaying the foundations upon which the data architecture of our internet systems stand. Creating sovereign realms in which our techno-sapien generation can reside. 

Our stack - DefraDB, LensVM, Orbis and SourceHub - are all being built towards this goal. Taken together, they make data management in distributed software function on edge computing networks. They give developers a chance to break the shackles of centralized cloud servers that impugn their freedom and rentseek from their activities, while also modularly integrating with the environments in which they already exist. 

Performance AND Ideology

As we’ve said on this blog before though - it’s not just ideological. Powerful distributed data management systems make throughput, latency, agency, privacy, and sovereignty for both applications and end-users viable. 

You can’t crowdsource an AI model without properly managing data across devices in an edge network working towards it, the bandwidth throttling that occurs relaying data through cloud rails makes it impossible  - you need Source Network. You can’t sync data seamlessly across a smart car fleet having to constantly query a single traditional database - you need Source Network. You can’t have a fully-operational IoT when the application data that makes it run is siloed and segregated - you need Source Network. Our tech stack is the wire in the walls that powers the lights in-house - hidden, silent, and utterly essential.

As proud as we are of our progress so far, there is always more we can do (remember, through our OPEN Quest and collaborative community - you can be a part of it too). A few weeks ago, we discussed how Source Network could power healthcare outcomes by acting as distributed data management for medical institutions that would allow them to restore patient sovereignty over data. Not only that, but also further cutting-edge research by allowing data-sharing with researchers who can run queries to their heart’s content without ever having that patient data compromised. 

Implementing Zero-Knowledge Tech

A key part of that puzzle is our implementation of ZK (Zero-Knowledge) proofs and ZK analytics in our tools. ZK proofs are a cryptographic protocol where one party can demonstrate to another that they know a specific piece of information is true without revealing the actual information itself. Like answering a question in a quiz without shouting out the answer and having everyone else in the room say they said it first. Being able to get answers from data without ever seeing the data yourself, or provide it to third parties without ever relinquishing its secrets, is a crucial step for the rewiring of the data economy.

Use Cases for ZK-Proofs

Use-cases for ZK analytics are broad. Proving your income for credit purposes without telling the bank how much you earn, proving you pay taxes without handing over your potentially sensitive tax return data, proving you have a degree without letting everyone know where you went to school - and so on and so forth. 

For a developer or institution and their application, the use cases have even more potential. A healthcare service could contribute their data to medical research while never breaking their patient’s trust. A company could undergo a government or private audit without exposing all their transactional data to someone. An age-restricted website can confirm user age and identity without actually taking custody of the information from their users. 

ZK analytics are a powerful way to scale operations for totemic industries. 

Making Data Move Faster

Our internet economy’s traditional systems of data management that operate through centralized servers all hinder applications ability to scale as navigating the labyrinth of access control, compliance, and non-interoperable software environments and means that, quite simply, stuff gets done slower - and application and user privacy are the first things to be compromised in the attempt to speed it up. 

Bandwidth is the lifeblood of software innovation. Source Network’s tools - with or without ZK implementation - already help this rate of scaling - but comprehensive ZK analytic tools means that user privacy can remain inviolable in our stack but still be shared, used, and propagated appropriately through the networks that rely on the data to perform.

All of these speed up operational throughput of their services or goal, enshrine data privacy, and crucially - help massively with compliance. Compliance becomes a heck of a lot easier when you’re not having to actually hold PII directly on your servers. If you never have to custody the data to make use of it, you never have to worry about compliance in the first place. 

For developers, this is a godsend. Our distributed data management tools - as well as powering edge computing innovation - are all about eliminating compliance headaches for developers and companies, and our implementation of ZK analytics in our tooling takes this goal to the next step. In this modern era, data sanctity is the key - and Source Network is the cathedral. 

Fully Homomorphic Encryption

On a longer timeline, Source Network will work on Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) to open up the potential to perform computational activity on data managed within our stack. Whereas ZKPs allow you to prove knowledge or verify conditions without accessing the underlying data, FHE goes a step further and allows for computational activities on that encrypted data. This opens up potential for statistical analytics, machine learning and advanced analytics. 

To return to our healthcare example, it means that researchers could perform statistical analysis on the patient data without those patients ever surrendering their right to privacy. For financial services, a bank can analyze spending patterns on their consumer data to build financial products - again without the bank manager noseying on what websites you spend your disposable income on this month. 

FHE is resource-severe, however. Only enterprise grade hardware configurations could perform operations like this at any respectable latency. This is where the true potential of DefraDB’s P2P database shines, however, as that computational horsepower could be crowdsourced by developers who use Source Network to garner their compute from the fringes to develop their application. The seeds have been sown, but more progress and widespread deployment of edge computing networks as the norm will likely need to happen - as well as wide DefraDB installation - to unlock this potential for everyone. That, however, is the journey we are on. Source Network - as we said in a previous blog - is a Swiss Army Knife for your data management needs - from individual developers to institutional teams. 

New Technologies for an Open Internet 

Source Network’s new paradigms of data sovereignty and privacy are fast becoming a reality. Everyday, our frontier tech advances to make the Open Web a reality. We are leaving no stone unturned in progressing the mission, and that means cryptographic primitives like ZKP and FHE are an essential part of our ultimate goal. These techniques are foundational for applications to maintain the sanctity of data while rapidly expanding its use-case and ramping its scalability. We are a city on the hill, which all eyes are upon, as we make the open internet a reality. You may know nothing, but that doesn’t mean you can’t be part of it.