The goal of chain anchoring is to secure the data integrity of a smaller private chain to a larger public chain for audibility without the high cost of transactions on a public chain.
Private chains provide the ability to scale number of transactions, lowering the cost per transaction and protects the privacy of the data. Public chains are more resilient to manipulation, where every transactions are validated.
The use of blockchain is mainly to show two things:
- That the data exists at a certain point of time; and
- That the data did not change after that point of time.
Placing all transactions on a public blockchain will guarantee that every single transaction existed at a certain point of time and did not change after that time. However, in most cases it is sufficient to show prove that data up to a certain point of time (at the time of anchoring) is valid and did not change.
For anchoring, we will designate the public blockchain as islands and the private blockchain as ships.
Verification service will run in two parts, an inspector service that generates a list of block headers stored on the public blockchain, and a skipper that fetches block headers from the private blockchain for the inspector to verify.
# Copy `.env.example` to `.env`
cp .env.example .env
# Install dependencies
make install
# Update .proto files
make protoSet correct environment variables in .env
Start the target island:
make island target=nem2
Followed by the appropriate ship:
make ship target=nem2
Example:
Set correct environment variables in .env
Start the skipper:
make skipper target=nem2
Start the inspector:
make inspector target=nem2
Example:
For details on how to build this project see HOW-TO-BUILD.md
If there is a blockchain implementation that is missing feel free to submit an issue or a PR (even better!). You can use the implementations here as a baseline.