Our portfolio company Onename is announcing something today that I think is pretty powerful. It’s a key value store built on top of the Bitcoin blockchain called Blockstore.

Onename initially built Blockstore for their own business but is releasing it to the cryptocurrency community today to solicit feedback.

Here’s how Onename designed Blockstore:

Based on the Bitcoin blockchain: Unlimited data storage: Storing large amounts of data in the blockchain can lead to blockchain bloat, so we decided to use a DHT for data storage while storing only hashes of the data in the blockchain, yielding virtually unlimited storage. Give money back to miners: Miners provide critical infrastructure for the Bitcoin ecosystem and we believe that any services built on top of Bitcoin should contribute to Bitcoin mining incentives. End-to-end design principle: The end-to-end design principle of keeping the core of the network simple proved to be very successful for the Internet, and we believe this is a good decision for blockchain applications as well. Thus, we use the blockchain for a few basic operations and keeping most of the intelligence client-side.

You can check out the Blockstore codebase and documentation on Github for more information.