Seamless Services for an Open World

A presentation at Causal Islands in in Toronto, ON, Canada by Brooklyn Zelenka

The advent of TCP/IP and the web produced an explosion of innovation by radically lowering the barrier to entry to connect over the network. Thanks to new technical and social innovations, we now have the building blocks for the next generation of open services: location-free verifiable data and computation.

Verifiable computation opens the door to content addressed function invocations, results, and workflows. This radically lowers the complexity of historical architectures (e.g. the LAMP stack), networked, and distributed systems. Not only is this easier to reason about, it also (paradoxically) enables superlinear scaling: the more it gets used, the more efficient it becomes!

This talk presents UCAN Invocations and the Interplanetary VM (IPVM). Code in this model is capable of running anywhere (even offline), respects data privacy, and services interoperate seamlessly out of the box without pre-negotiation. Since computation doesn’t happen in a vacuum, we will also describe how the workflow planner interacts with existing services, and how to lift them into this seamless paradigm.

Resources

The following resources were mentioned during the presentation or are useful additional information.