CommerceBlock, a public blockchain-based infrastructure enabling the distribution, exchange, and storage of tokenized assets and securities, today announced that its MainStay service is now live.

This service has actually been running in the background for a while now, with a major client testing the service for their sidechain solution. MainStay was developed in collaboration with partners at Securosys, to ensure best in class security for the service.

The MainStay white paper originally proposed to be purely an attestation service for sidechains. However, it since has evolved to something much bigger. The CommerceBlock team amassed strong interest from law firms, media content firms and other industry verticals about how they can use MainStay to attest their data to Bitcoin, the world’s most secure blockchain, to prove the immutability of their data.

MainStay

MainStay provides cryptographic proofs of a single, verifiable history of data changes, without needing to trust any authority.

Cryptographic proofs can be used to secure a wide variety of data sources such as permissioned blockchains, auditable databases, software repositories and document tracking systems ensuring that the history of state changes cannot be tampered with or altered in any way.

This ‘Proof-of-Immutable-State’ (PoIS) is obtained via the trustless immutability inherent to the Bitcoin blockchain. Bitcoin’s global proof-of-work consensus process creates an objective and incorruptible ordering of transactions that need not rely on trust in third parties.

MainStay utilizes this immutability via a so-called ‘staychain’, a chain of successive commitments to a fan-in-only sequence of linked transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain where each transaction has only a single output. Enforcing this single-output rule for all transactions ensures that the staychain can only have a single, non-branching history from the base of the chain to the tip.

Following this rule, the staychain state is therefore as immutable as the Bitcoin blockchain and is backed by its proof-of-work. Verifiable state commitments to the staychain are then also immutable, and the immutability of any sequence of committed states can be proven by verifying the validity of the staychain.

The MainStay service operated by CommerceBlock provides a mechanism for service users to access a specific position (slot) in a Merkle tree of commitments which is then regularly committed to a unique Bitcoin staychain. This enables the provision of ‘Immutability as a Service’ where a large number of systems/processes can utilize a single Bitcoin staychain, with the cost of fees shared among all users.

The Mainstay service provides a public REST API that enables users to seamlessly integrate third-party systems in order to both perform state attestations and retrieve cryptographic proofs for independent verification of trustless immutability.

Mainstay service features:

Obtain the full immutability of the Bitcoin blockchain for any system or process

Trustless audit trails and tamper-proof tracked changes

Straightforward integration with existing systems

Simple, intuitive API and clear documentation

Independent verification of proofs using open source tools

For more details check out the MainStay documentation.