We have, to date, highlighted the radical possibilities inherent in our distributed data management tools. We’ve shown how DefraDB can power up smart car fleets, orchestrate DePin networks, empower interoperability, protect privacy, and enshrine sovereignty for developers and users alike. 

DefraDB is the workhorse database tech that allows data to finally be free of the clutches of centralized control, and in turn, unlock hitherto impossible levels of horizontal scaling for our online software; but it can’t do it all by itself. It needs a trustlayer to ensure everything is working as intended.

It needs the SourceHub. Currently approaching its second testnet, SourceHub is the key - quite literally - to the Source Network.

What is SourceHub?

SourceHub is a bespoke custom-built blockchain that acts as the trust protocol for DefraDB’s operations and ensures robust decentralized security, auditability, access-control and authentication around its functions. Built using the Cosmos SDK, the SourceHub’s chief function is to - in a fully decentralized manner - validate the activities performed by users, applications and devices accessing data managed by DefraDB. 

It is SourceHub that keeps user and application data private, using DID protocols to ascribe identity, set permissions, and grant authentication to various users and usernet groups. It’s on SourceHub that developers create and enforce access control policies that are granular and complex, allowing for large organizations of people or devices to have appropriate variegated access to the data they need to use or function. 

Access Some Areas

SourceHub’s ACP Module is a Zanzibar-based decentralized authorization system that closely resembles the Relation Based Access Control (ReiBAC) system. In Zanibar’s Relation Tuples, there are references to an object (the thing being worked on), the user or groups of users (the devices or actors), and the relationship between them (whether they exist in the same network or work in the same department, for example).

From these simple building blocks, near-infinite access control policies can be defined - with relationships between users and objects becoming in effect permissions on what they can access. Using the module, developers can write policies using our ReiBAC DSL to create authorizations to documents on DefraDB, Secrets on Orbis, or other digital resources. 

These expressive policies are far more flexible and nuanced than traditional role-based or attribute-based access control. Moreover, ACPs are fully recursive and can query one another - essential for building the required granular access control with the appropriate complexity for sovereign applications to interlink without gaining inadvertent carte blanche access to each other's data.

Once these policies are set up on SourceHub, the protocol operates continuously to ensure validated access to data managed by DefraDB. This is where the true benefits of the blockchain come to the fore. SourceHub, as a blockchain, has all the features of transparency, auditability, and watertight security that are needed to create a truly decentralized system for managing data and maintaining absolute integrity over operations in the network. When an application or user queries, accesses or changes a document on DefraDB, SourceHub authorizes the activity by checking the ACP, and then records the behavior, ensuring that all data is being managed appropriately. 

True On-Chain Utility

Think of how a classic blockchain validates token transactions (which SourceHub also does), SourceHub validates activities performed by users or devices within networks using DefraDB for data management. Although DefraDB self-validates using CRDTs and Merkle DAGs for internal consistency, the protocol anchors and authorizes that process. This means that an application using Source Network’s tools at no point resorts to centralized authority to maintain the immaculate integrity of the network. It’s decentralized from the ground up. It’s decentralized at the Source.

SouceHub, to note, is also the economic backbone of Source Network. Ultimately, as more developers decide to create their applications to be completely sovereign, SourceHub’s validation functions will require gas to operate, and those operations will be paid for by applications using DefraDB. 

As DefraDB is modular and can sit under an application’s current tech stack to help it achieve interoperability and sovereignty, and because that data management is held together by the SourceHub trust layer, then in time, Source Network becomes a universal data value attractor. SourceHub can give financial incentives to all developers to boost the expansion of Source Network as a whole, as well as encourage more validators to join the cause and help secure a decentralized, open, sovereign and free internet.

The Hub of Everything Source Network Does

SourceHub is very much at the center of Source Network but, unlike other blockchains, it's not merely focused on the simple activity of sending value to other private keys on the ledger. SourceHub is what a blockchain with true utility looks like. Where your wallet isn’t just for storing value but managing your entire enterprise.

The chain is a powerful access-control tool for developers to craft bespoke, sovereign interaction with their application and have that interaction mediated by a vast and decentralized validator set and not governed by a single entity and all the practical and ideological pitfalls it entails. 

To create a truly decentralized internet, you need much more than just a blockchain - you need databases, secrets management, authentication systems - but you also need a blockchain. Transparent, immutable, auditability, tamper-proof, censorship free, permissionless. SourceHub is all of these - but it is also so much more. 

Testnet2 for SourceHub is nearly underway. Be part of it, and come see what blockchain technology is truly capable of.