Decentralization is not a magic solution. In fact, when poorly implemented, decentralization is just a slower, more brittle and more expensive way of delivering solutions that current infra has already solved for developers. Bitcoin’s meteoric rise in asset value (the fastest since tulips and most sustained since oil) in the ‘10s and so far through the early ‘20s led to a whole generation of project leads desperately trying to recapture that lightning in a bottle and analytically extend the paradigms that made Bitcoin and Ethereum so valuable. Forget decentralized money, what about a decentralized internet?

HBO’s Silicon Valley had this goal as the driving plotline of the show and, to less seasoned observers of the tech landscape, it seemed the way everything was trending. Destroy the cloud! Break the corporate oligarchy! Restore a fair and free internet suspended aloft the smartphone in every pocket! Indeed, we’ve spoken to this potential ourselves, because it is a potential future, just not a promised one.

What Web3 Gets Wrong

The denizens of Web3 have fixated on breaking the cloud monopoly and replacing it. This is flawed. We have spoken at length about trying to remove the cloud as the centrepiece of dev-ops and making it a peer not a proprietor. Yet the cloud is not the problem all by itself (in fact it’s often the solution). When building edge-native systems, the problem is the dependence on third-party infrastructure altogether. Decentralization is not the same as sovereignty. 

Decentralization is a property of sovereign systems, not the purpose of them. Whether you rely on one person or twenty, if there is still dependency - then there is still fragility. This is what many in Web3 and crypto have gotten wrong. A blockchain with ten validators often just means ten things can go wrong instead of one. You might remove AWS, but if your application network still relies on aggregating data to third parties and if your authorization is still reliant on a third party KMS, then no sovereignty has been achieved.

True sovereignty happens at the edge. Where data is born and can be acted upon independent of third party infrastructure. Where application processes for autonomous vehicles, smart cities, factory robotics and energy grids can run independently of an exterior cloud system or central server controlling those actions. By making data sovereign and orchestrating activity at the edge, we create resilient systems that can function in the face of any given threat. In Masamune Shirow’s seminal manga Appleseed, control of a utopian city is seized by terrorists because they capture authorization to the city’s central computer Gaia. They then switch off water, electricity and the defense systems that protect its citizens. In a world where Source Network is the data management layer, this could never happen - because these processes can be built to work independently of central control. 

Escaping the Cloud, Not Replacing It

Edge-native systems don’t want to replace the cloud, they want to escape the need for it altogether. That doesn’t mean they don’t want to use it. It’s a perfect backup and powerful coordinator. Yet they want to avoid any potential latency or downtime in their operations. A factory in San Jose can’t stop manufacturing because a data center in Oregon goes offline. Traffic lights in Seoul can’t break because a server in Busan fails to sync. In a globally connected world, there is a move towards more local operation. Processing crucial application data at the edge in real time in order to scale more powerful and more resilient systems. Cloud giants see this too, and are spending enormous investment in a race to make edge-cloud hybrids work.

Take AI for example. Companies want their AI to be federated, not decentralized. They want to run inference on-device, have models reacting in real-time to data picked up by sensors, and have more scalable infrastructure for deployment rather than running all requests through a single central server. They want to ensure the data collected or produced by their local AI models remains within their own ecosystem, rather than harvested by a third party whose stack they have come to rely on. They want to make sure the data an AI uses to train is pristine. They want their models to train on their own data collected on their own devices, not aggregate it to a third party infrastructure you can’t trust. Merely decentralizing the computation and storage of data is not enough - it does not guarantee sovereignty. Only data made sovereign at source, by Source Network, does. 

Sovereignty, not Decentralization 

Source Network’s stack applies fine-grained, cryptographically enforced permissions to data as it’s created by the device or software, specifying who can use it, how, and under what conditions. DefraDB nodes can collect, process, and sync data with the wider edge device fleet autonomously. Thanks to CRDTs, should a device go offline and diverge in its state, it can automatically resync with the rest of the device fleet as it reconnects. In areas with autonomous connectivity (or even Bluetooth at a pinch), devices on site  can continue to operate in tandem with each other and continue collaborating and functioning independently, even if ‘central command’, say a cloud server, goes offline. Its imbued permissions mean such connectivity loss is no threat to the data on the device itself, which is cryptographically secured by DefraDB, with SourceHub in support acting as a trust mechanism. 

Although there will be a public SourceHub chain, with its attendant decentralization, tokenized incentives, validators and all the other Web3 apparel, with businesses using the protocol as a compliance tool and failsafe against disaster. SourceHub, in conjunction with DefraDB means every action processed by the database is audited on-chain, and the ability to verify that operation is inherent in the data itself, which mutates to create a cryptographically verifiable trail of what had occurred, and which enables easy rollback, automated compliance, and efficient disaster recovery.

Our stack is about giving developers choice, not about sending them on a flawed ideological crusade. Yes, centralized data is a problem. Yes, invasions of privacy are deplorable. Yes, utilities like AI should be captured by the masses. And yes, centralized servers should not harvest the world's data before promptly losing it all in a data breach. The thing is, Source Network solves all these problems by default as it builds towards its true mission: resilient edge-native systems and utilities that scale exponentially alongside a new sovereign data layer that empowers organizations and individuals alike to enjoy a free and open internet.