DefraDB lets any developer take back control of their application data. This is far more than just an ideological imperative, it’s a force multiplier for your application’s ultimate utility. Total data sovereignty built on the DefraDB foundation gives you the ability to scale your application infinitely in the free market of an open internet.

DefraDB is a P2P distributed database that allows for pristine data management. It can manage access controls for any database structure, distributed or otherwise. Any entity in the network, be it a user, a smart car or any other sovereign application, has a sovereign identity which manages data ownership and access rights. Users retain full control of their data through these identities, and can use fine-grained access controls to issue detailed permissions on who or what can access it - and why. It’s an essential trustless framework for any application where sovereignty, security and compliance are crucial. It’s not just about storing data, it’s about ensuring you have the full set of tools and functionalities for its entire lifecycle - security, governance and disposal. Yet it’s more than even that.

A Sea of Change on the Internet

As society has built out its online infrastructure, hitherto, it’s always been about who has the biggest moat. Yet by implementing a decentralized substrate for data, it becomes about what software has the most useful application. We are opening up the prospect of a true free market for developer applications without all those developers in thrall to the practices and services of a large entity controlling their data management and thus their entire function - and charging them for that custody. 

Take the early days of the internet, Microsoft tried to quash open source, trying to create a completely closed computer ecosystem. Imagine the software wasteland today if they had succeeded. No Linux, no Android, no WordPress. No Git, Blender or Apache HTTP Server - the list goes on. Of course, open source doesn’t mean not financially motivated or out for gain (Google acquired Android) - but it has meant faster progress, greater collaboration, better trust, and endless improvement to software. A truly free market.

Returning data sovereignty to developers and users would be like open source and free software movement combined, with added steroids. If applications can run completely independently from the infra they are deployed on, vendor agnostic, powered by an interoperable P2P network, they will innovate. If they can interact and exchange with other applications without having to conform to particular schema, querying cumbersome and permissioned APIs, all while paying exorbitant rents for the privilege - they will flourish. If they can move away from the proprietary tools and data formats from cloud service providers, and instead migrate their application effortlessly, they will prosper. Source Network’s tools are the foundational framework for developers to kickstart this next era of the internet.

The Importance of Sovereign Data for Scaling 

DefraDB’s modular deployment ensures that developers can go on using their current tech stacks while they begin migrating their data management to Source’s truly scalable solution. DefraDB’s decentralized interoperability makes it perfect for DePin, edge device, local-first software or IoT networks looking to scale fast. As it sits, these networks are drastically hampered by vendor lock, proprietary database tooling from cloud providers, and the ability to efficiently deploy updates to an entire network of devices at low latency, or even at all. Furthermore, you don’t want your application data open to improper access, nor do you want third party data brokers (legitimately) accessing your data to corrupt or lose it in their custody.

Take smart cars. A smart car is a brilliant sensor for urban environments - they could power some smart cities almost by themselves with their potential to be powerful edge devices. On a more basic level, it’s great for a company to know key data like location, speed, and diagnostics. In theory, a rational consumer would be delighted for their car to also function as a public good computer as it sits in garages, driveways and parking lots - as it does 90% of the time. In theory, they’re happy for the company to have the ability to provide insight on their cars as they use them. 

Yet they are not, they are queasy, because of privacy. For developers, it’s because the journey of that data from a smart car to Corporate HQ is longer than we usually suppose - and far more treacherous than we could ever expect. In the process, the custody of that data goes through many hands, and it does it at great cost. Because the data is not sovereign, because the smart car is reliant on a modern internet that has been land grabbed and relies on cloud infrastructure to deliver the services we are used to.  It needs third party proprietary software to send the data, proprietary software to receive and store it, and a large team of data engineers ensuring compliance the whole time. While paying rent. It’s just not efficient enough. We need to open the internet and let all devices talk freely, and that’s what DefraDB is doing.

Financial Benefits

Obviously, breaking centralized rent-seeking control of your software environment is going to help. Yet the financial benefits of owning your own data extend far beyond that. Ideologically, enshrining user privacy by default is going to win points as you seek users. Yet there are multiple practical benefits to companies owning your data and using DefraDB and our tools. When exchanging data with another application or service currently, the process is arduous - wasting dev time building bespoke APIs for interaction between databases. 

Yet because DefraDB is environment agnostic and through LensVM can transform data types, you don’t need it. Any new application you want to share data with you can simply update your access policy, and then they can begin interfacing with your database and your application seamlessly through the fine-grained access control structures you set out - which can be revoked at any time. The potential for global partnerships is insane as it is flexible. Costco could share permissions for its inventory with Tesco cross-border - leading to additional revenue streams for both - without ever breaking compliance.

There are numerous security benefits too, for users and for companies. Even if you are happily outsourcing your cloud-based data to be farmed and are actively seeking to sell it, by distributing it through vendors you are exposing yourself to additional risks over its sanctity and its provenance. Users of your application may be willing to have their data - even identifiable information - sold by you if they had ironclad assurance over its custody. Privacy doesn’t just mean shutting the blinds, it means opening the right windows. And in a data-hungry world, applications running using DefraDB for their data management can enshrine new inalienable rights for their end users - and profit enormously from it.

There are numerous base practical benefits in operation too. Think of the redundancy potential. Your application will not be reliant on any other single or even multiplicity of machines to continue functioning correctly and operate within a given network. No random Crowdstrike at a critical moment. What’s more, because DefraDB is a framework that can integrate with your pre-existing software stack, it means developer operations can continue as normal while transitioning to a fully decentralized stack - gaining redundancy benefits as they progress.

The Network Effects

Interoperability means scalability. By building an open internet, we encourage participation and ultimately progress. Smart car fleets, smart cities, DePIN networks for compute, cloud, energy and sensors, and local high-speed internet - to name just some of the things we’ve already covered in this blog. All these processes are currently hamstrung by the accidental tyranny we let happen during the Web2 process, where we sacrificed the liberty of our networks due to the opium of progress growing behind the walled gardens. DefraDB, by breaking the vendor lock of both software and hardware, creates a truly free market of sovereign applications where privacy is protected, and where new devices can infinitely scale horizontally onto existing networks with near-zero operational overhead. That means they grow forever without compromising their core security.

Sovereign data is far more than some ideological paean for the little man, it’s a way to make our internet work better. Seamless secure compliant data exchange across every device. Data encrypted at source, privacy protected at source, applications decentralized at source, interoperability at source, DefraDB by Source.