The World Needs a Scalable Blockchain Database — The BigchainDB Blog — Medium

The World Needs a Scalable Blockchain Database

We started ascribe with the goal to serve creators. We saw that creators were getting a raw deal and that the blockchain could allow them to break the lock on content, distribution and licensing of the entrenched players.

Starting with digital art, we created a platform that allowed creators to claim their authorship and notarise the claim on the blockchain. We built an ownership protocol that we called the SPOOL, a secure, public online ownership ledger, that jerry-rigged the authorship claims onto the Bitcoin blockchain. The ownership protocol was very powerful because it could be used for any type of non-financial asset to register, transfer, loan and consign property — all using the Bitcoin blockchain.

Since going live one year ago in February, we’ve had countless conversations with players along the entire ecosystem — artists, creators, galleries, assessors, collectors, marketplaces and auctioneers.

What is clear is that we are in the very early days of a movement that allows creators to take more control over their intellectual property and creations.

We’ve had over 20 marketplaces and services integrate with ascribe and are now approaching 4,000 artists with 40,000 unique editions on our platform. We continue to work with creators but we’ve also reframed the problem because of two fundamental challenges with blockchain technology.

First, the Bitcoin blockchain in its current form isn’t truly scalable. The current blockchain can handle about 150,000 entries a day. Respectable, but nowhere near enough capacity to handle the world’s transactions. There are proposals to scale it 10x but that isn’t going to be enough to enable and capture the true growth potential of the technology. Other groups have created blockchains that scale more, up to 1 billion entries a day which takes care of most use cases that people can conceive of. But there isn’t a blockchain that allows for truly blue ocean re-thinking of the way we can integrate blockchains in to all facets of our society. We at ascribe wanted everyone on earth to have the ability to record their intellectual property contributions on a blockchain, but it won’t be possible until we have a blockchain that can handle millions of transactions per second.

Second, blockchains require a new type of leadership to be successful. To build successful applications on top of blockchains, you need collaborative leadership that brings a bunch of diverse groups together for mutual benefit. You need to overcome mutual distrust for everyone to agree on common standards for storing data, running business processes and to manage the network infrastructure that powers blockchains. A blockchain is a trust network, where each party gets benefit by being in the network, but also agrees to expose their transactions in real time for everyone to see and validate. As an outsider to the existing art network, our ability to create a trust network from scratch is extremely hampered and limited.

We saw that given these two limitations in the blockchain, that ascribe could do more than support creators and the blockchain community. So while preserving our work and learnings, we decided to focus our energies on two challenges:

First, to support trust networks across industries — including art, so that those who do have the skills to bring together networks of collaborators, can have a partner in the journey to implement blockchain solutions. We want to be the partner of choice for those looking to build trust networks on blockchain technologies and proof-of-concepts — to help strategize and find the best partners in the emerging blockchain ecosystem. We work with all the blockchain companies to bring the best skills and technologies to solve the challenges of anyone wanting to deploy blockchains.

Second, to provide a scalable blockchain database for the community — I’m pleased to announce today, that our team has built a scalable blockchain database that can handle 1,000,000 writes per second. We call it BigchainDB — The Scalable Blockchain Database.

It’s a breakthrough technology that allows for new innovation and blue ocean thinking on new use cases for blockchain technology. It allows people to reimagine how blockchain technologies can be deployed, without worrying whether it can scale to their needs.

Our scalable blockchain database plays well with existing platforms and processing, such as Ethereum, Eris, Tendermint, Stratos, Enigma and the Interplanetary File System (IPFS), because it enables developers to cleanly separate processing, workflows, permissions, transactions and data so that programs can run efficiently and scale.

More will be announced on our technology roadmap and partnerships in the coming days. We published a whitepaper explaining our thinking and the approach we used to achieve this breakthrough. You can download it at www.bigchaindb.com.

If you want to help build a database for the world or want to learn more, contact me at bruce@ascribe.io.