Hey everyone,

So far this week, John and I have been working largely on more SDFS documentation. We’ve spent time sorting out our requirements and potential designs for how permissions within a decentralized container might work, such that a Member of a Container might invite a new Member, but specify that the new person may not, for instance, add Assets to the Container (making their access, in this context, read-only). So far, the design centers on the concept of a Container Owner, as well as Container Administrators, all of whom can change other Members’ permissions within the Container.

Aside from that, John and I have been investigating what it would take to build SDFS on top of the EOS Blockchain instead of using Multichain, as EOS may provide some advantages over Multichain. It has been fascinating to discuss how SDFS might operate via Smart Contract instead of utilizing raw transactions on Streams. It may also simplify (or perhaps invalidate) some of the subsystems we had been working on, such as Chainmail, since (as we currently understand it) the upcoming version of EOS can run multiple Private Blockchains, and can process Transactions very quickly. Furthermore, EOS can provide a pegging mechanism between its Public and Private Blockchains, which helps us solve a tricky situation we were going to have to face using Multichain (in short, how do we prove that a person paid for a Container on a Public Blockchain such as Ethereum and represent that in a Private Blockchain such as Multichain?).

We are just beginning to scratch the surface with EOS, and are currently uncertain of which benefits and/or drawbacks we can expect, but we’re still in the early stages of this investigation. Check back next time for futher updates.

About the Author:

Cody Sandwith is a University of Washington graduate, and has been working for Topia Technology since 2011 on Secrata, a highly-encrypted File Sync and Share Platform.