Blockstack: A New Internet for Decentralized Applications

Abstract

The traditional internet has many central points of failure and trust, like the Domain Name System (DNS) servers, public key infrastructure, and end user data stored on centralized data stores. We present the design and implementation of a new internet, called Blockstack, where users don’t need to trust remote servers. We remove any trust points from the middle of the network and use blockchains to secure critical data bindings. Blockstack implements services for identity, discovery, and storage and can survive failures of underlying blockchains. The design of Blockstack is informed by three years of experience from a large blockchain-based production system. Blockstack gives comparable performance to traditional internet services and enables a much-needed security and reliability upgrade to the traditional internet.

Publication
BlockStack
Date