Great writeup, Simon.

Wanted to share a few more details on Mediachain, as we believe it will be a crucial layer in the stack for building decentralized media applications like Ujo!

From a high level, we see the stack as having three layers:

Ethereum: application control logic (business & economic processing of song registrations)

Mediachain: scalable, structured, indexed, searchable metadata storage (decentralized database of song information)

IPFS: media storage (artwork and the actual song files)

Some of the key features of Mediachain:

great for storing lots of small metadata objects and maintaining their structure and interactivity, such as song metadata linking to license and artist identity

all data IPLD under the hood

Mediachain also recommends COALA as a standard for representing license/IP rights

data structured in feeds so applications like Ujo can expose a list of songs to UIs

indexing and search to allow querying by fields such as “artist”

other applications can discover the Ujo dataset through a decentralized directory

realtime updates regarding new songs published via pubsub

all data is signed and content addressed

native integration with Ethereum smart contracts, so Mediachain nodes can listen for registrations passing through the Ujo SC

bindings for UIs in JS client (Electron or web)

The core infrastructure is in place and is in production today with over 400 million records written to date.

We’re currently building out the integration with web3 so Mediachain nodes can listen to Ethereum contracts for media registrations. This should enable Mediachain to replace Ujo’s proprietary back-end with a completely decentralized solution.

We’re finalizing the work on this in the next few weeks, so be on the lookout for an official announcement of Mediachain integrating with Ethereum then!

http://github.com/mediachain