IPVM: Seamless Services for an Open World

A presentation at StrangeLoop in in St. Louis, MO, USA by Brooklyn Zelenka

The advent of TCP/IP and the web produced an explosion of innovation by radically lowering the barrier to entry to networking. Thanks to recent technical and social innovation, we now have the building blocks for the next generation of open services: location-free verifiable data and computation. This talk presents UCAN Invocation and the Interplanetary VM (IPVM). IPVM code runs anywhere (even offline), respects data privacy, and services interoperate seamlessly without pre-negotiation.

Verifiable computation opens the door to content addressed invocations, results, and workflows. This greatly lowers the complexity over traditional architectures (e.g. LAMP). Not only is this easier to reason about, it also (paradoxically) has better than linear scaling: the more it’s used, the faster it is! As anyone can participate, it doesn’t depend on the handful of data centres provided by large orgs: anyone can provide capacity (including in underserved regions like Africa and South America).