Decentralized architecture of Inner Peace App

[yaqin05]

Privacy has taken centre stage across the world. Be it the allegations on tech giants, American Presidential elections or the debate in the Indian Parliament regarding Government’s right to use citizen’s data, a rise in awareness can be seen across the globe. It is a welcome change that needs to be embraced and appreciated. The world is moving towards a new order with respect to how user data is being harvested and more importantly being used. All forms of user data are being utilized every day. It can be as simple as the amount of time we spend on a particular webpage or the people we meet or the photographs in which we are tagged or the recent trend of 10 year old images. But the question that often comes to our mind is should there be a filter or a qualifier on the kind of data that is allowed to be harvested? Case in point for this broad question is the mental health apps. Most of the mental health apps deal with intimate details about an individual. As a user, one would hope that their data points remain private and expect that their information will not be misused. But the level of trust between the user and the app that she/he uses needs to be sacrosanct. With the advent of blockchain technology, this trust deficit can be minimised to a large extent.

Inner Peace, a gratitude journal leverages blockchain technology to ensure that users are assured that no one is misusing or snooping into their data. It uses Blockstack’s decentralized architecture to create their identity and store the data. How it is done is explained below,

The Blockstack network stores application data using a storage system called Gaia. Transactional metadata is stored on the Blockstack blockchain and user application data is stored in Gaia storage. Blockchains require consensus among participants and hence they are slow and blockchains are also not designed to hold a lot of data. This means using a blockchain for every bit of data a user might write and store is expensive. Blockstack mitigates this problem by storing data off of the blockchain which ensures that apps like Inner Peace provide users with high performance without central trust parties.

Blockstack addresses blockchain performance problems using a layered approach. At the base of the system is a blockchain and the Blockstack Naming System (BNS). The blockchain governs ownership of names (identities) in the system, names such as domain names, usernames, and application names. Names in Blockstack correspond to routing data in the OSI stack. The routing data is stored in the Atlas Peer Network, the second layer. Every core node that joins the Blockstack Network is able to obtain an entire copy of this routing data. Blockstack uses the routing data to associate names (usernames, domains, and application names) with a particular storage location.The final layer is the Gaia Storage System. A Gaia system consists of a hub service and storage resources on a cloud software provider such as Azure, DigitalOcean, Amazon EC2, and so forth. Moreover, users choose where their data lives, and Gaia enables applications to access that user data via a uniform API. When the user logs in, the authentication process gives the application the URL of a Gaia hub, which then writes to storage on behalf of that user.

A Gaia hub runs as a service which writes to data storage. The hub service writes to data storage by requiring a valid authentication token from a requestor. Gaia’s approach to decentralization focuses on user control of data and its storage. If a user can choose which Gaia hub provider to use, then that choice is all the decentralization required to enable user-controlled applications.