Apps like Facebook have been around for years, and while many new technologies have enhanced our experience of apps, we’ve been making a lot of lateral moves to navigate stagnant problems — problems like security, speed, ability to scale up at an instant.

But that’s finally about to change and it won’t be the 15th competing standard.

The technology is — yes you guessed it — blockchain technology.

It was an innovation first built to house trustworthy digital currencies — then it became big in the financial industry, and as per any technological innovation, found it’s way into the rest of our lives. So, how does this relate to Facebook?

Facebook has the same problem as most other apps: they hold a lot of data from personal information to images, messages and relationships with other users’ data. That data has to live somewhere.

Right now, that data is in a database that lives on the cloud — a computer that can easily clone itself to any data centre in the world to serve people that data quickly.

The issue with the cloud is:

It’s expensive to run

It’s centralized (all the data lives in one place)

It’s therefore, not inherently secure

In order to scale up, the cloud relies on corporate data centres

In order to speed up, those data centres need to be close to the user

So what does blockchain do about all that? Well, the data is no longer tied to a single computer or data centre. The data is instead split across everyone’s personal devices, each one only holding a fragment of the actual data, and each one encrypted with different security measures. Depending on where you are in the world, those personal devices will be closer to you in order to speed up. The list goes on, but the notion remains the same: blockhain is here to stay.

When we realized this, we started building a database for future apps that will allow them to run on the blockchain. In fact, we’re almost done and we are nearing release. You can get the first-hand update by joining our open Telegram group: