Five years & thousands of R&D hours later...the TODA Protocol achieves decentralisation
The first TODA enabled product, GOTO, will ship this fall and open sourcing will begin
(3 min read)
When Ben Horowitz, co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz wrote The Hard Thing About Hard Things, he provided an invaluable guide to startup management and the challenges of growing a business from scratch.
Within the startup world there is smaller sub-class of ventures called deeptech where there is a whole other complication to deal with as well.
Rather than being driven primarily by innovation, usually with the business model and technical improvements and innovations over what exists today, deeptech ventures are centred around net new invention of technologies that don’t exist and have potential to change the world.
In 2017 when TODAQ was founded the TODA protocol was in its early days. A first whitepaper had been produced and there was a path to produce functioning software that could execute pieces of a new form of ledgerless decentralisation.
The aim was to create a distributed graph data architecture that would allow any data or digital asset to adopt the properties of the physical world, like a piece of paper. Done correctly that would provide a number of benefits, including:
Unforgeable identity and assets would greatly enhance security and integrity;
No limits to scale of transactions or assets;
More powerful ability to create and manage complex, investment-grade, insurable assets;
Portability of assets and interoperability across any system, blockchain or device;
True P2P settlement without the need for intermediaries; and
Greatly improved cost efficiency compared to today’s best-in-class solutions, including removing the need for a settlement gas or token as found in blockchain systems.
By summer of 2019, the first commercial implementation was done, and we created a software API platform called TODA-as-a-Service and executed the first commercial PoCs and projects with it. TaaS worked well and provided improved security guarantees for integrity of assets over what existed in the market and more cost and time savings when settling transactions, but to you had to connect to it to harness TODA, and it was centralised. You couldn’t take the truth of the assets out of the TaaS system.
The much harder work of decentralizing started in early 2020 as COVID hit. There were far more questions than answers at that time, including what would products designed on a decentralised TODA even look like and whether decentralising TODA could even be achieved. For a deep-tech startup this is a terrifying prospect. However there is a saying that is useful during these sort of times. When you’re going through hell, keep going.
Collaboration started with researchers out of the University of Cambridge and University College London and the TODA project turned into four separate but streams of R&D: TODA, ADOT, FEWD and CBDC.
TODA. TODA is a distributed graph data architecture that secures any type of data with a cryptographic data structure called a TODA file to create a unique digital asset. TODA files are digital things that have the qualities of physical things. Transferability. Permanence. Agency. Possession. TODA has achieved the milestone of creating a successful decentralised design with commercialisation starting in 2021. The next phase of work will be preparing the first papers, specifications and shareable for publication and starting open sourcing.
ADOT. An Object Centric Application Protocol that enables software systems to create, interpret, authorise, transmit and transact TODA files between each other without requiring system or data integration. ADOT is a stack of technologies and protocols that work together to make TODA accessible and usable by everyone, everywhere. Limited components of ADOT relevant to building and deploying the first commercial product GOTO have been designed, tested and deployed, but there are several project components still in active R&D.
FEWD. Fair Exchange Without Disputes - Many blockchain systems have atomic swap capability to enable a two way exchange with simultaneous settlement and no escrow agents or brokers, but the assets you can do it with is limited and constrained to within that blockchain system. What is missing is a universal atomic swap solution for everything. Any type or combination of digital assets, including not just TODA Assets like TDN, but also custodial assets, global trade goods, bitcoin, ether, NFTs, twitter accounts, AWS credits, book manuscripts, dog pictures, anything, can be exchanged without relying on an escrow agent.
CBDC. Central Bank Digital Currency. Using ledgerless decentralised technologies such that CBDCs could be designed without facing the tradeoff of either accepting the responsibility of operating a core ledger or ceding control of the CBDC. Thus bringing the qualities of physical cash: (possession, privacy and no fee extraction) to digital money and payment systems.
You can see more background on these projects here and each will be publishing papers and books starting in 2021 and 2022, and establishing the first developer builder community.
After many long months of work the modern design, testing and hammering of a new modern TODA that would enable decentralisation was done and by the winter of 2021 the working software infrastructure and functional demos and PoCs were being coded. Concurrently we started learning from the market the first place to put it into useful action. By summer of this year the GOTO product began coming together.
Apart from commercially shipping product, the next exciting phase of open sourcing will now also begin in stages. We’re grateful to have the first open source leader, Red Hat, along as a partner as this phase begins. Starting next month the first partner technology teams will join the TODA ecosystem to collaborate on specifications and shareable code, and to build TODA enabled systems and apps, as well as convert existing systems to be TODA capable.