Archain, a decentralized and uncensorable archive for the internet is nearing the end of its successful pre-ICO. With Archain’s browser extension, your favorite web pages can become a permanent part of history with just a few clicks.
Cryptos R Us had an exclusive interview with CEO Sam Williams and CTO Will Jones to learn more.
Can you guys please share a little bit about your background and how you came up with the idea for Archain?
Sam: Both Will and I are Ph.D. students, nearing the end of our degrees at the University of Kent. Will’s background is in graph theory, statistics and neural network modeling. My background is in distributed systems design. In particular, as part of my Ph.D. I developed an ‘internally distributed’ operating system from scratch in Erlang (HydrOS).
I came up with the core of what has become Archain while walking up a mountain in Scotland. I had to briefly stop and type out the ideas on a phone in the pouring rain! By the time we came down the other side of the mountain, the idea was reasonably fleshed out.
It was only later, when talking with Will, that we came up with the Blockweave and Proof of Access algorithms that really allow Archain to scale to the sizes we desired. This is when we realized that Archain could become something truly special.
Archiving the internet seems like a no brainier, can you explain how the process works? Do people have to select the page they want to archive or will your platform scan the entire internet?
Will: Archain’s archiving is user driven, it crowdsources the selection of important information on the internet to archive. From the user’s point of view, becoming a part of this crowdsourcing effort is extremely simple. Users can download the Archain web extension (alpha version available now) and from there on, pages can be archived in just a couple of clicks.
Under the hood, however, Archain is taking some extra steps to verify the contents of each web page. Using a distributed consensus algorithm, Archain attempts to verify the contents of each page before it is submitted to the weave. With a few extra pieces of work, this allows Archain to build up a “virtual” archived internet of guaranteed validity — links and all.
Furthermore, users are not limited to tackling this problem on their own. Users can also create special interest archiving groups that work towards storing some particular type of content together. Users can also write programs that interface with the Archain directly to automatically store pages, for example, at a given time every day. Users need not even use the verification functionality if they don’t want to!
While Archain is designed with strong cryptographically verified internet archiving in mind, it will also take pretty much any other kind of data, just without the extra web page verification step. Overall, Archain is designed to be as flexible as possible and put the power of permanent archiving into the hands of the user.
What other uses do you see Archain being able to provide? Are there other business cases?
Sam: Absolutely! The Archain is essentially a permanent, distributed hard drive offering ‘Permanence as a Service’ (with an internet archive built on top). Archain is a solution to any problem that requires the storage of information for long periods of time and will be available to companies without any startup costs — simply pay for the amount of data that you store.
An example usage would be an accountancy or solicitors firm that is legally required to keep certain files and documents for many years. This is typically a costly and risky affair, as each individual firm must essentially design and implement its own system of redundant and fault tolerant storage.
With Archain, they could simply upload encrypted copies of their documents to the blockweave, paying only the small storage fee. This provides incredible industry-wide efficiency savings.
We also expect that Archain will lead to the development of an entirely new ecosystem of permanence-based apps. For example, using the Archain Developer Toolkit (already available), startups will be able to build censorship-resistant social networks, microblogging platforms and even potentially human-memory augmentation systems. Archain makes it possible for anything important to be remembered eternally, cheaply.
Further to all of this, the Archain Developer Toolkit allows the creation of custom Archain nodes that can monitor and analyze the contents of the network in real time. These apps essentially receive a hand-collated feed of important documents from the internet.
These ‘passive monitoring nodes’ could be used for projects as varied as automated traders, brand management, open source intelligence analysis and societal trend analyzers. There are example implementations and work through about how to build such systems on our website.
When is the alpha testnet going to become live and who can participate? And when do you expect the main network to launch?
Will: Currently we are on schedule to release the alpha testnet in December this year (2017). Initially, only those who have reached our “developer” rewards package will be eligible to participate in the alpha testnet, but it’s likely that, closer to the full release of the product, that we will open it to more and more of our contributors to enable us to get the best feedback about Archain possible.
Speaking of the main release, our current schedule is a release of the full network in late March next year(2018). This will be preceded by approximately three months of our main sale.
Are there any other things you want to talk about?
Sam: Our token pre-sale (including a 25% bonus) is nearly over, the main token sale will start later this year. We are always available via email (team@archain.org) or on our Slack channel (linked on our website) to answer any and all questions.
