Launch Spotlight: Source Network
The Builders Program Launch Spotlight is a regular series where we highlight a recent or upcoming launch of projects we’re excited about.
Addo and John are co-founders of Source Network. They have deep backgrounds in shipping products, with over two decades of combined experience across web2 and web3, gained from working with startups and Fortune 500 companies. Addo is responsible for the front-end of Source Network, driving its vision, growth, and partnerships. John is responsible for the back-end of Source Network, building its vision, software architecture, cryptography, and shipping code. Together, they strive to delight web3 developers and deliver the missing piece to drive the next wave of adoption.
What is Source Network?
Addo & John: Source Network is a decentralized data management infrastructure ecosystem. Driven by web3’s vision of a decentralized, permissionless, and trustless future, we’re extending the ethos of blockchains to off-chain data management. With DefraDB, our P2P database, and our Cosmos SDK-based trust layer protocol, SourceHub, developers gain the tools and infrastructure to create truly decentralized applications. By leveraging native cryptographic primitives for data security, granular privacy controls, and P2P synchronization across a wide array of edge devices, cloud platforms, and decentralized infrastructure providers, we provide developers with unprecedented flexibility and security to unlock the true potential of web3.
How Does It Work?
Addo & John: Source Network comprises two core components that complement each other to offer the first decentralized data management infrastructure for web3 — our decentralized peer-to-peer user-centric privacy-preserving NoSQL database, DefraDB, and the network trust layer SourceHub, a Cosmos SDK blockchain.
DefraDB, the soul of our stack, is a global P2P database, which provides users direct control over their data. It works seamlessly across devices and environments, featuring NoSQL storage, MerkleCRDTs, P2P networking, content addressable identifiers, and semantically linked data.
SourceHub is the trust layer that DefraDB nodes anchor to. Built with Cosmos SDK, it provides the consistency required by the database nodes, access control & policy enforcement, identity management, secrets management, and document anchoring & auditing. This synergy enables user-centric data access, with applications requiring consent to access user data.
What Did Your Road To Launch Look Like?
Addo & John: Our original thesis was to build off-chain data interoperability with IPFS. As we were trying to build that project, the team identified a much bigger problem for web3: decentralized data management. Web3 had decentralized storage, compute, and protocols, yet developers were forced to use centralized databases when it came time to manage data across that infrastructure. These centralized databases introduce single points of failure and prevent the realization of the true web3 vision. Source Network’s core belief is that apps are only as decentralized as the least decentralized component, meaning using a centralized database was out of the question. We saw a huge opportunity to fix data management for web3, but creating our database was just the beginning.
We recognized the necessity of a decentralized trust layer, which would complement the database by augmenting it with all the necessary features and functions to assist developers in building privacy-first user-centric applications. This inevitably led us to the Cosmos SDK, which offered the most comprehensive ecosystem to construct this trust layer. This enabled us to present the first truly decentralized solution for managing data in web3.
What Can We Expect At Launch?
Addo & John: Our rollout is different from typical web3 projects because, as mentioned above, we have two complementary pieces to our offering. To follow lean product development, we focused our efforts on getting DefraDB released as quickly as possible. This approach allowed us to collect feedback and input from developers as we worked on the protocol. To learn more about our decentralized database on our Developer Docs page, or you get started building here. Current capabilities include:
- MerkleCRDT based Documents
- GraphQL first Query Language
- P2P Synchronizations
- Decentralized Schema Management
- Self-Verifying Data Models
- Native Privacy
- Deployable Anywhere
The second phase is the launch of SourceHub, which will come with the following systems required by DefraDB and beyond:
- Document anchoring & auditing
- Access control policy and permissions engine
- MPC secrets management
- Identity management
- Developer-first tokenomics
Over the coming months, we will be releasing public testnets; plans are to go through three testnets before the mainnet.
Further, as we don’t have any incentivization mechanism in our tokenomics for compute and storage, we are also working on deployment and storage connectors. Starting with Akash Network, followed by integrations with IPFS/Filecoin, Blockless, Arweave, Dfinity, Fleek Network, and many other infrastructure projects for our mainnet and thereafter.
What are you looking forward to?
Addo & John: Empowering developers to build truly decentralized applications and extending the ethos of the interchain ecosystem to off-chain data. There is a lot of “decentralization washing” in web3, which is causing confusion and hurting the industry. Vitalik highlighted the same issue when he posted that the biggest threat to blockchains is “the rapidly expanding centralized world that is imposing itself on us.” The only path forward is to weed out any and all centralized components in web3 together, with protocols, storage, compute and everything in between becoming truly decentralized, all the while making it easier for developers to build — and to do so as UX-friendly as with centralized alternatives or even better.
The interchain ecosystem has pioneered countless ways to bring us to the modern and modular protocol stack. We look forward to furthering that work and collaborating with the entire ecosystem across protocols, storage, indexing, compute, oracle, DEXs, and countless others to bring the decentralized vision of web3 to fruition.
The Interchain Builders Program provides mentorship and guidance for Web3 founders looking to navigate the Interchain. We help teams with incorporation strategies, fundraising, token economic design, technical support, validator bootstrapping and going to market. If you’re a founder looking to build on top of the Interchain Stack, we encourage you to apply to the program now!
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