Introduction
The Digital Objects Network is a decentralized network that facilitates the creation, execution, and exchange of Digital Objects. Digital Objects are fully programmable state machines that are owned and operated by Internet users, and that can be passed between mutually untrusting Internet users (for example via email) while maintaining their integrity and consistency, without relying on any central trusted authority.
The Digital Objects Network is a very general platform that many applications could be built on. Concretely, Digital Objects can be used to represent many different things: a record in a distributed database; an entire database; a unit of monetary value; an access permission; an attestation; the status of or a lock on another Digital Object or group of Objects; and more. Because Digital Objects are fully programmable and maintain their integrity and consistency across trust boundaries, applications whose data and procedures must execute across multiple untrusting entities, and that were previously prohibitively expensive to run (in trust, operational overhead, or other dimensions), can be operated on top of the Digital Objects Network. For example, transferring residency records between multiple countries or states with heterogeneous systems of record can be implemented as a single atomic action if Digital Objects exist to represent "ports" into each individual system. Likewise with money moving between different financial networks, or records on multiple different ERPs that a business would like to ensure update atomically.
Objects are files held privately by their owners. Each state transition is proved in zero knowledge, and the network publishes only opaque commitments to Ethereum blob data, so the chain sees neither an object's contents nor its code.
Stack
The concepts required to realize the Digital Objects Network, from higher to lower level, next to how they are implemented today:
| Concept | Implementation |
|---|---|
| global state derivation | permissionlessly operable synchronizer |
| global bulletin board | Ethereum blobspace |
| Class-Action SDK | pexe/Rhai SDK |
| Class-Action protocol | podlang txlib |
| private statement proving system | POD2 |
POD2 is itself layered:
| Concept | Implementation |
|---|---|
| predicate language | podlang |
| statement derivation kernel | MainPod plonky2 circuit |
| zk proving system | plonky2 |
Contents
- Concepts describes Digital Objects, the operations users can perform on them, and what the network needs to stay live.
- Architecture describes the components that make up the network and the client configurations users assemble from them.
- Installing the driver covers installing the driver, opening its browser UI, and adding a plugin.
- Testnet lists the parameters of the current testnet and the hosted services that serve it.
- Running the services covers running your own archiver, synchronizer, and relayer.
- Examples describes how applications are packaged as plugins, and the example applications in the repository.
The source for the network and these docs is at github.com/0xPARC/digital-objects-network.