Data, in our current model, is architecturally heavy. When apps and services store and manage data, it exerts a kind of mass. Its operational necessity and its intrinsic value contrive to make applications, compute, storage and logic all gather around it to function. We build apps, capture data inside them - and it becomes stuck. Systems groaning under the weight of their own gravity and dragging everything into it, data siloed and pinned to the app that collected it, dying stars forming black holes that guzzle everything in their galaxies inwards - stifling innovation, raising rents, and creating enormous technical overhead and labor demands.

The Crushing Weight of Data 

In this model, you often can’t move the data without moving the entire stack. To audit, you must engage with your multitude of scattered providers. Your local storage setup might not comply with local regulations, and where data lives, it shapes how it can operate, governing its constraints and costs. The cloud simplifies this, creating an effective but monolithic gravity well that makes the app model work. 

But as more and more data is collected, the weight of that centralized data inexorably drags entire companies into wasteful patterns of coding and deployment. Untangling permissions, rowing against schema drift, updating infrastructure - all in a bid to keep the pipelines working. Data gravity simply becomes vendor gravity, with lock-in brittle integration points and when you finally want to try something new - when you want to innovate in a free and open internet, you can’t.  

Escaping the gravity well as it continues to mass doesn’t just become difficult, it becomes structurally dangerous for your infrastructure. When the cloud doesn’t work, your infrastructure doesn’t even spin up in the first place. The weight of these monolithic systems prevents change. The cloud is a powerful guiding star, but it needs to be a peer in a constellation of peers, not the sun itself. 

Avoiding the Data Singularity 

We must avoid a data singularity, where the entire global systems of the world line up for their gruel every time they poll the bloated API god on his datacenter throne. To do so, we must distribute the mass. We must give data its own sovereignty to travel the stars, not be trapped in inefficient convoys. The data you create should be owned by you, not stored on someone else’s backend, in someone else’s format, and to someone else’s benefit. You reduce the edge advantage, decrease data portability in a way that reduces operational efficiency, and are always reliant on someone else.

Make no mistake, the cloud is essential to deliver our web systems - when it’s fast, stable and friendly. Yet it can’t be everything to all people. The gravitational pull that data architecture exerts is too powerful in the model for innovation to occur. Latency, risk profiles, compliance, and cost all become exponentially large the greater the architectural mass of the stored data.

A Launchpad to the OpenWeb

Source Network is about flipping the model. It’s about putting data first, making it a first class citizen, and breaking the gravitational manacles that make managing it so difficult. In this world, data defines its own permissions, it contains within its own audit history, and it defines its own shape. A financial transaction log can define audit access for regulators and accounts without replicating data or issuing keys manually, all by itself. In this world, apps are thin clients that operate on the data they need to, and don’t wait for permission. The logic flows to where the data lives, or the data flows to where logic needs to be. Either way, the data itself is detached from its architectural lodestones. Data becomes the source from which all software springs. 

How? By enabling edge-native systems and removing the pain point of needing central permissions, arbitration and sync upkeep. By letting devices maintain functional resilience in the case of cloud outage, and by allowing developers and app creators to maintain control of the data layer and the value inherent within it. 

DefraDB is a edge-first P2P database that can orchestrate activity on the device without needing an uplink to a central server and, thanks to CRDTs and the interoperability of schema provided by LensVM, it’s a bi-directional schema translation tool. It can comfortably remerge its updates with other devices or software services in the fleet’s network when connection is reestablished. Like the cloud, but the key difference is that downtime doesn’t necessarily stall operation of the device or the software. This kind of resilience is crucial in life-essential services like energy grid maintenance, hospitals, and financial services. SourceHub is the trust engine for this activity, as all interactions and permissions with data are logged, reconciled and validated, with access given according to the granular relational permissions as defined in the ACP, and built atop decentralized identity primitives managed by Orbis.

Flexible Data, Efficient Applications

Data sovereignty and data privacy - but not data hoarding. By being able to write complex field-access permissioning, it means that apps, projects, companies and institutions can actually share their data more, because they can tightly define access to different parts, and not be forced to give zero or carte-blanche access due to the idiosyncrasies of their data storage handler. Best of all, the attack vectors and the resultant threats that have continuously occurred, causing billions in lost capital and leaked data, can slowly be reversed. 

First-class data is also very easy to audit, because it carries records of its own behavior, all of which are cryptographically verifiable. Prove, don’t trust. Data regulation and the demands of proper data lifecycle handling are only ever going to increase, especially as governments respond to concerns about AI and our increasing state of surveillance capitalism. With Source Network’s stack, you can just hand the data over, audit-ready and cryptographically signed. It audits itself - and you can prove it. There’s no way to break compliance because, with properly written ACPs and appropriate storage - you can’t. The data won’t let you. 

No longer dumb and inert, data can begin to find its own way in the world, free from the stick, monopolistic and brittle centralized gravity well, and powered by its own sovereign gravity. Modular, portable, composable - and able to go wherever it pleases, staying with who it should. Patient data stored with the patient, with hospitals no longer needing to port EMRS between different legacy systems. Financiers can structure client onboarding data once and let it proliferate (with permissions) across all their services instantly, with appropriate scoped access for auditors, insurers and revenue and customs as regulations dictate. The list goes on and on.

Escape Velocity

Source Network doesn’t kill the cloud. The cloud is an excellent technology. It’s just showing its age, and the next era is nearly here. By shifting to a data-centric paradigm and empowering edge-first stacks, the cloud becomes a backup, not a bottleneck. It can stay a central place of operations and first resort provider of services if desired, but is not absolutely critical for the always-on resilient functionality required by modern apps and our modern society. Source Network’s stack is about kickstarting the next era. Edge-native, always on, and effortlessly scalable. It’s now about reaching escape velocity questing into the wide Open universe of the Web.