The Distributed Application Software Stack
Eris Industries has launched today the first components of its distributed software stack. Congratulations to the amazing team behind Eris on this first step, its the beginning of an incredible journey.
I am not going go over technical details on Eris (read https://decerver.io/ and https://thelonious.io/ to start), you can find a lot of information on their various blogs https://blog.erisindustries.com/ , https://tao.erisindustries.com/ , https://db.erisindustries.com/ and https://eng.erisindustries.com/. I will just summarise a few thoughts on why I think what they are building matters.
– So far the internet has favoured the creation of monolithic highly scaled platforms. While they compete with each others, there is undeniably a moat in massive tech infrastructure and data aggregation. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it was until very recently very difficult to think of an alternative model that would support a similar scale without building a monolithic platform. Distributed architectures (while not new) have shown with the emergence of Bitcoin that blockchain technology could support such endeavour.
– Building efficiently organised distributed organisations is often limited by the necessity of building a central platform to coordinate the interactions of its various members. In Financial Services, MasterCard, Visa are examples of such platforms. It is often only available for organisations with enough resources to start building these platforms and enough embedded margin to create their business model.
– These problems are often compounded when an organisation’s goal is to create such a distribution at the user level, for example recognising each user level of participation as experimented in the Assembly model.
In order to start experimenting with building organisations, services that smartly and leanly support the creation of distributed organisations at various level (between users, between companies, between countries ?), an architecture that allows the distribution of the data and the transparency of the underlying logic will play a fundamental role. This architecture does not prevent third parties to act as an intermediary but changes the way they can operate. By distributing the running cost of the platform to its various participants, they can experiment with new business models that don’t rely on their ownership of the data and the infrastructure.
So what happens next? Eris industries has built a software stack to support the creation of such organisations. As with any early phase, the experimentation that we hope will happen through developers leveraging the platform will be the groundwork for the creation of the services, organisations, companies of the distributed future. I am looking forward to see what they will build.
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