Recap of 2018 — the evan.network development story
What a ride… 2018 is coming to an end, and we give you a recap of what has been developed and which improvements we made on evan.network during the year.
Going Open Source
All our created packages like the API, smart contracts and the UI DApp framework were published under an open source license in 2018. You can freely use these libraries/contracts within the evan.network and build your own use cases and applications on it. You also have the ability to look at the full source code of the APIs and smart contracts to get your own picture of them, to analyze them and to find or fix issues. This is the most important part of the open source license, the community. Everyone, who uses the packages and wants to improve the API or wants to build a new feature for it, can do this and send us a pull request with the implemented feature. Simply following the paradigm “sharing is caring”.
Improvements towards security on chain and on storage
We are an enterprise blockchain, so our focus lays on the data integrity and the data security of our users. On the blockchain, basically, all transactions are publicly visible by default, so that everyone can validate them. Enterprises usually do not want that every transaction is visible to the whole network, because their data should not be readable by everyone. We have implemented a secure way how your data is stored on the decentralized file system and how it is then referenced in the blockchain.
To encrypt the data we are using only strong encryption mechanisms like AES with 256bit keys. All communication between two parties on evan.network uses an own random generated key that makes it almost impossible to decrypt any data between these two parties. To ensure that no external server or the blockchain node itself can read your data, we adjusted our API to end-to-end encrypt and decrypt the data live your browser.
DBCP makes development a lot easier
When creating smart contracts, these are designed and deployed forever. In the future, the initial smart contract functionality will be extended or the data scheme of the contract changes. Now, you are in the dilemma that you have to maintain two separate smart contracts, for example different ABIs in your DApp or server. You need a smart contract description or definition directly at the contract to get the most up-to-date ABIs for the contract or data schemes for stored data.
With our research project DBCP (Distributed Business Communication Protocol), we defined together with business partners and the Fraunhofer an open source protocol for smart contracts. With this protocol, a smart contract can introduce his functionality and possible APIs/DApps, which can serve the content of the smart contract to the outside world. It has a huge impact on how DApp developers can interact with external smart contracts. This description scheme is the glue between a smart contract, a DApp and a possible external program, which is connected to the blockchain like a smart agent.
Performance optimizations in smart contracts
To get the most performance and useful features out of our developed smart contracts, we constantly analyze and optimize the code base and inter-contract interactions between these. This year, we introduced the contract factories, which can set up a fully configured smart contract like a digital twin with predefined rights and roles and also predefined data. The advantage of the factories are that when you use it to generate your digital twins, it is done within one single block on evan.network.
New Features and Services on evan.network
evan.network is not only a public blockchain out there, no. evan.network gives enterprise features built on top of the Ethereum blockchain. So we have set up a bunch of features, which are ready to use for your own use cases on the blockchain. Like the Digital Twin Generator DApp, in which you can simply define your digital twin and generate the associated DApp within minutes. The digital twin has the ability to share specific data sets with other profiles on evan.network, such that you can collaborate together.
Also, trust is a major point on the blockchain. The question “Can I trust this account or contract where I’m invited to?” can be answered on evan.network with the newly introduced Claims Service. With this service, you can issue and verify given claims on accounts or smart contracts. You can also issue trust chains across different claims, which can be verified of each other. With this feature, we can build a large claims network full of trust and decentralization.
To ensure European GPDR compliance, we have developed mechanisms with that developers can now build custom blockchain applications, which are fully compliant with the GPDR on evan.network. This can be realized when no personal data will be stored on the blockchain. Since we are storing all personal data encrypted on the decentralized file system, the user has also the ability to delete this data completely and the blockchain must not be forked.
Many other interesting features are already on the roadmap for 2019, so there is a lot of work to do, bringing evan.network forward to a decentralized open ecosystem.
For the latest news around evan.network, please follow us on Twitter.
