Technical Level: Intermidiate

EyA - The Interchange of Everything

An entire stack of technologies designed to empower organisations and people from any industry and discipline in the world

Challenge

Challenge

A Brief History of the Internet

Most of the entire population of the world have or use the internet every single day for a whole plethora of reasons, whether it be online shopping, social media, or complex business transactions, data interchange and supply chain functions. However, the internet was born a very long time ago and at the very base of the layers of technology are the complex routing and switching technologies building a completely dynamic network of links between other networks. Simply put, the internet is a vast network of networks, whether it be university servers, business servers, online servers and many other types of network. Before good firewalls, home computers even became part of the network of networks - many times without the owner realising, but that is another topic altogether.

Most of us have at some point heard of TCP/IP and some even UDP, but little is known about what is actually happening when we visit a web site, or upload a file using FTP, or even login to a remote server using RDP or SSH. Why? Because we really don’t need to know, or even start to understand and that is one of the real beautiful and intriguing aspects of a stack of technologies.

Basically put, FTP, RDP, SSH and of course the most common WWW use ports within the TCP/IP internetnetworking model. For instance, WWW uses ports 80 (plaintext) and 443 (encrypted) ports of TCP and SSH uses port 22. We have at hand 1024 ports on the lower end of the range and something we call the ephemeral range going all the way up to 65534 - which means we start at 0. There are a vast number of protocols which many do not even realise exist, some from way before the internet and some from the early days, way before www was even conceived.

Imagine if you had to understand all of the technologies involved to conduct a web search, or daily business. You wouldn’t adopt, the onboarding would devastate most business budgets.

The Dotcom Blockchain Era

Remember the late 1990’s when everybody had a ground breaking solution, developed locally (or not at all) and said it was going to revolutionise something. Most failed miserably, in part due to the fact that somebody forgot that a local area network was a whole lot faster than the 56Kb/s modems most people and even companies were using to connect to the internet in order to “surf” the web.

Well, we are here again with so many blockchain solutions being developed for singular sectors, all promising to change that sector for the better and of course, yet another application which the targeted audience have to adopt.

These solutions are usually built on layer one or now even layer two technologies, but still using the blockchain architecture, in the main being slow and poorly encrypted and expecting of companies to divulge their private data to all, just relying on an encryption technology to save the day. For each of these solutions, decentralised apps (dApps) are developed and usually a nice looking user interface focusing on that particular sector.

So, looking from a birds eye view, we have the internet being a network of interconnected (and intra too) networks capable of tunnelled connections to each and everyone and suddenly, blockchain solutions are creating vast silos of industries ripping apart the whole methodology of interconnected worlds.

Now, it can be suggested that there can be connection points between the blockchains. However, this would be yet another minefield, where engineers would need to understand each particular model, how and what data is stored and how to then make that compatible with another chain - in fact all of the other chains. ODBC was developed a long time ago when there were varying database models, but again, a connector had to be developed for each of them and many where simply left behind. Even the internet had to adopt a common protocol, and many do not know that there was not only the adopted TCP/IP, but Novell's IPX/SPX protocol (along with a number of others).

So on the base of it, blockchain solutions could actually rip apart the hard work which has been the focus of many an experts work life, and breeds the common phrase - “Blockchain cannot solve all use cases”.

Fortunately, the architects of EyA disagreed and decided to rebuild the interconnected world of everything.

EyA - The Stack of Layered Technologies - Which Does Not Need to be Understood

EyA - The Stack of Layered Technologies - Which Does Not Need to be Understood

The architects of EyA were long term veterans of the early Internet and architects of the modern connected world. They were also database experts ranging from the older services, through to modern ultra powerful database technologies.

It was evident to the team that the only way to ensure distributed technologies would be mass adopted was to create a layered stack of technologies, where the ledger was close to the bottom, well away from businesses having to adopt yet another application, but instead being able to embrace and adopt interconnected data with their current technology implementations. This is where the work started and the process of designing the next generation of the networks of data networks began.

Like with the Internet, EyA has developed strict, but extremely comprehensive protocols, leveraging the power of our adopted ledgering solution, Corda. Corda is packed away, deep within the stack and performs the ultra fast and secure P2P transactions expected within distributed ledgering. However, this is like the layer underpinning TCP/IP on the internet, rather than the exposed dApps on most blockchain services.

Like the internet, EyA then has multiple layers, including security and CorDapps, again, way below that which even developers will see or use. Instead, we reach up further through the stack to a plethora of API’s, which provide standardised access to data transactions and also to a unique method of creating a database of relational (and not so relational) data fields, which mimic that which an engineer would see within common relational databases like MS SQL.

This alone allows for rapid connectivity of a company’s current database solution to an interconnected data world. However, EyA takes this way beyond just “dumping” data and transacting within a particular industry. With the higher layers, it is ultra fast to connect to other industries, other data sets, other business operations from any sector, anywhere at anytime.

Taking on the internet’s network of networks, EyA has also adopted this method with privacy of data leading the next frontier. Organisation data is never propagated across the EyA cloud, but instead only intrinsic parts of data required to perform any type of transaction are shared between the companies acting within that particular transaction, meaning private data is just that (finally). Again, though, EyA knows that there is data which needs to be open and seen by anybody, for instance product information which a consumer would want to read, or a firmware update to a household router. With the granular permission based solution way up in the layers, companies and even people can control exactly what others can see and partake in.

EyA has been designed from the ground up to reconnect the disconnected world and empower the next generation of business, technologies and rapid growth required within the 5, 6, 7G and way beyond.

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