Overview

We develop structures for a self-authenticating protocol specification; a set of primitives and technical specifications for building open e-commerce networks.

Our design supports an interoperable network of independently hosted Provider Supporting Nodes and Buyer Supporting Nodes - generically referred to as a Personal Data Stores (PDS) - that are responsible for onboarding participants on either side of a market, storing their data, and relaying transaction intents to a range of open services in the network.

Our design optimizes for:

• Scale: Our Authenticated Data Model can prove its own "validity" without an external validator through simple crytographic signing methods. Such properties are important when sharing data with untrusted parties in distributed systems.
• Extensibility: The Local Schema Definition Language (NSDL) provides a standardized and extensible way to define new data structures, record types, and API methods as the network grows into new markets and use cases.
• User Choice and Portability: if any Personal Data Store fails to maintain it's service, begins charging high fees, or has performance failures, users are free to switch to a new managed host (Personal Data Store) without requiring permission from the original host.
• Interoperability: The Local Schema Definition Language (NSDL) and Node Registry promotes interoperability between different nodes, services, and applications.
• Self-Sovereign Identity: The design introduces a self-sovereign identity framework that gives users control over their identities and data within the network.
• Developer Experience: The Local Schema Definition Language (NSDL) and Local Remote Procedure Calls aim to provide a robust developer experience with tooling like code generation, runtime validation, and strong type guarantees without sacrificing interoparability with other peers.
• Token Economies: Individual users (Buyers and Providers) and services all have globally unique identites on the blockchain. The blockchain serves as both a discovery layer, and infrastructure for token based incentive mechanisms.
• Trust: We introduce concepts for authenticated, conflict free data structures through a signed, content-addressed, Merkle Search Tree. Such structures allow us to widen the set of storage and computational possibilities to a much broader set of untrusted providers.
• Usability: We adopt WebAuthN as a universal registration and authentication standard. WebAuthN is the w3c specification underlying Passkeys. Passkeys are a significant UX improvement over traditional seed phrase management mechanisms for decentralized identity solutions.