News
DataTrails has been granted a U.S. patent
April 2024 by Marc Jacob
DataTrails, an innovator in integrity, transparency, and trust technology, has been granted a U.S. patent which details advanced methods of verifying blocks/evidence in Storage Optimized Blockchains.
Building on the patent granted last June, the company’s latest patent further enables practical scale for distributed ledgers, putting an end to the limitless storage requirements that come with ever-growing transaction data, while improving scalability, performance, availability and cost.
Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) is a crucial foundation for transparency and provenance in digital communication platforms. This extends well beyond the realms of cryptocurrency encompassing applications in multi-party supply chains, responsible AI, media transparency and authenticity, Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) initiatives, the Internet of Things (IoT), as well as in regulatory compliance and auditing, among others.
While distributed ledgers record confirm and log a sequence of transactions, as the number of transactions increases more data is created necessitating an increase in storage capacity. What’s more, distributed ledgers are immutable, meaning nothing is ever deleted from the ledger, so storage requirements constantly grow. This leads to problems with scalability, performance, availability and cost.
The DataTrails patent on verifying blocks in storage optimized distributed ledgers enables more flexible storage of the chain data in parts without losing the end-to-end cryptographic verifiability of the chain. This addresses fears and costs of maintaining ever-growing data.
Known techniques exist today that aim to mitigate the blockchain storage problem by reducing the storage space required for the blocks – squashing empty blocks together or using compression to reduce the storage space requirement for all blocks in general. While these solutions help to a certain degree, they only delay the inevitable - and eventually the same storage issues arise.
The new DataTrails patent innovation will be transformational in terms of the scalability and cost of deploying blockchains and distributed ledgers, and rapidly brings forward the time when distributed ledgers are ubiquitous across enterprise applications.
DataTrails aims to eliminate the time-wasting, expensive and error-prone processes required today to verify and validate information as it flows between companies, ensuring it is safe to use.
