Geeq Data

An essential value proposition of blockchain is that it is an automated system that offers unbiased mathematical proof that a given transaction has been processed correctly. If you have proof, you no longer have to depend on another party’s version of the truth.

In fact, the ability to produce indisputable proof is one of the most sought after outcomes in advanced blockchain technology.

Geeq has solved this problem. Geeq’s protocol efficiently calculates proofs of inclusion for each transaction entered in a block, distinguishing between transactions deemed valid and invalid. Geeq’s proofs of validity and inclusion are durable; they will hold up despite any attempts to tamper with the data in the blockchain itself.

This fulfills the promise of blockchain technology: when various unrelated actors are able to check the provable status of the same data, previously intractable coordination problems can be solved. Geeq’s technology incorporates permissions to read, write, and verify on-chain data for deployments of private chains suitable for enterprise and regulatory use.

Proofs are the bedrock for the phrase: “don’t trust, verify”.

Proof makes life easier

Whether you want to access your proofs now or later, knowing proofs exist and the same proof may be produced at any time has immense value. Use an app like Geeq Data or an API to send data to a Geeq blockchain, ask for the proof to be returned, and relax. The job is done. You have done your part. The technology can do the rest, to produce a durable (permanent) receipt.

Private Geeq blockchains have the ability to restrict who has access to them. However, as long as a small set of data (hashes) are published, a stranger can verify your 1 kb durable receipt using only these hashes, which reveal nothing about the underlying data. They do not even have to have an account on the blockchain to convince themselves of your claim.

Thus, you will not have to worry about assembling your various identification papers, making phone calls for permissions and then faxing copies for confirmations, or waiting for a time-intensive audit or expensive challenge to confirm your statements.

Geeq’s proofs are easily accessible, inexpensive, and available for any level of granularity of data you have chosen to submit to the blockchain.

Non-crypto applications for blockchain proofs

Supply chain and provenance: Once a digital object has been registered on-chain, it is possible to prove all on-chain claims to transfers of ownership. Using Geeq’s white-labeled, no-smart contracts NFTs, these digital objects may represent physical objects as well. Putting NFTs and attestations together on a Geeq chain provides independent certainty (with proof) over lawful ownership and transfers of ownership, whereas a dissatisfied employee may be able to tamper with a company’s internal tracking system during transit in order to falsify data.

Data lineage and chain of custody: A permanent, unbiased ledger of record may be automated where each step in a chain of custody is accompanied with proof based on contemporaneous attestations to the blockchain. For such sensitive data, Geeq’s industry-leading security crucially provide proofs that endure despite internal or external attempts to alter the data.

Compliance and auditing: A blockchain may be set up specifically to validate transactions required for compliance and auditing. Data may be sent automatically to an API or attestations may be provided individually. Upon receipt, validation occurs and is recorded in a block: at the same time, the existence of the proof may be calculated. Geeq’s standardized methods provide a convenient way to link the entire history of provably reported data, substantially decreasing the costs of compliance and audits.

Cyber-resilience and data integrity: Durable proofs of inclusion and validity can be used to ensure data restored after a cybersecurity attack are the same as the data that existed before an attack. These proofs may be kept economically in a system that stands apart from an enterprise system, akin to providing an “air gap” to prevent contamination between computers in a network.

The Geeq difference

Geeq’s protocols and data structures have been optimized to make the calculation of proofs affordable, efficient, and convenient for enterprises and individuals. Proofs of inclusion are approximately 1 kb for each transaction. These durable proofs are small enough to be stored locally on customers’ own hardware, even for huge volumes of transactions.

An ingredient in Geeq’s secret sauce is that Geeq’s standard transactions do not use smart contracts, a deliberate choice to eliminate a tremendous amount of complexity. It is one of several reasons Geeq can call itself a Layer 0 platform.

In contrast, platforms that incorporate smart contracts require data availability for each smart contract before it is able to truly verify the state of each contract and/or the code for interdependent smart contracts. These extra steps add costs in fees and time, cannot guarantee durability if a smart contract is exploited, and are very much a work in progress.

Confirmation is not enough. You need proof.

Confirmation your data is in a block is not enough. Any website or app can generate such a message, without ever touching a database. Software from a centralized provider can give you a false message if it has been compromised and – even if you think the message is correct – you’re trusting the provider to tell you the truth.

Conclusion 

Proofs that do not depend on a trusted party are an essential part of the blockchain value proposition. Centralized parties have additional costs and security concerns to keep your current data safe, much less reconstructing proofs of the history of your data at a granular level. When you are fully dependent on a trusted party and they go down, they can take you down with them.

Geeq’s patented technology delivers the proof you need to protect your most valuable data. You (and your centralized providers) can use Geeq to prove the state of your data in a block whenever and to whomever you like. Simple.

Geeq will roll its services out to enterprises first. Enterprises need an independent way to verify transactions across their own departments. They have partners and regulators to satisfy. Geeq’s technologies offer new methods to share unbiased and validated proofs that will stand the test of time with external parties. When all the milestones in the roadmap are complete and ready to accommodate public nodes, Geeq’s open source technology will become available for public use.

Delivering user-friendly proofs for public blockchains will mark a major advance in the blockchain technology space. Although there is still development work to get to ‘mainnet’, Geeq has already laid the groundwork for durable proofs at scale. Watch this space for explainers, guides, and examples to be published later this year.

All proofs in blockchain depend on using hashes, public-private keys, and repetition (more formally, recursiveness). These mathematical calculations are tried and true and have been used in computing for decades. What’s new is how efficiently Geeq applies these to its blockchain data structures.

Cybersecurity is often referred to as a game of “cat and mouse,” which is somewhat inaccurate since it misses the fact that the scale of the game is continually escalating. According to Statista, businesses spent around $8.5 trillion on cybersecurity in 2022, which could increase by up to 150% to exceed $20 trillion by 2026.

But that startling sum is only the headline. Upon examination, there are even more surprising statistics outlining the extent to which cybercrimes are draining the bottom line of businesses. Although the end objective may be anything from holding a company to ransom, to selling customer data on the black market, the immediate goal is always data theft. Therefore, protecting the security and integrity of data is paramount. This is where Geeq Data can play a role in helping enterprises step up their cybersecurity game.

Here, we round up some of the latest cybercrime research and how Geeq Data helps to mitigate or contain the risk of attacks.

Removing the leverage from ransomware attackers

According to IT service provider AAG, ransomware is the most common type of attack in the United States, accounting for 30 percent of all incidents, and in Europe, where it’s used in 26 percent of incidents. Ransomware breaches typically take longer to contain and are more costly than other types of attack, with the costs rising further when firms refuse to comply with ransom demands. Lockbit, one of the most prolific ransomware groups, has claimed responsibility for a number of high-profile attacks, including one on the Californian state finance department at the end of 2022. 

With Geeq Data, organizations can put any amount of company data onto a private enterprise blockchain. At Geeq, each node builds and maintains a ledger of data independently, so any attack on another node – or even all other nodes – cannot compromise the data integrity of a node that hasn’t been attacked.  In this way, Geeq provides a higher level of security than other blockchains. 

If Geeq Data is used for the most important or sensitive pieces of information, organizations will have a way to quickly identify which of these crucial data in their ordinary SaaS or graph databases have been tampered with and, depending on how they’ve used Geeq’s tools, will have systems in place to restore critical data after the breach – without paying ransomers a penny.

Reducing the time to contain a breach with enhanced data protection

Based on 2022 data, it takes a firm an average of 277 days to contain a data breach, and there is a direct correlation between the amount of time it takes to contain a breach and the cost to the firm. Hackers are constantly developing more sophisticated attacks that are harder to detect.  Without a tool like Geeq Data, one can only expect breaches to do more damage. 

Retrieving backups and verifying the quality of data can consume a vast amount of time following a breach, much of which can be spent on contacting and reassuring customers. But even if a firm is able to restore its data, how will it be able to prove to its customers that the new data accurately reflects their old records?

From the customer’s perspective, Geeq Data blockchains are completely invisible. Yet they can mean the difference between receiving a notice that their personal data may have been compromised with an offer for annual identity protection services while the company tries to determine what happened versus receiving immediate, complete reassurance over the status and quality of their data with a clear action plan. Geeq Data is constructed to deliver proofs that are unambiguous and easy to verify, which enables firms to provide certainty they are doing everything they can for their customers and their data. 

Enabling more secure remote working

The pandemic normalized remote working for many organizations, but it comes at a cost. It’s now estimated that remote working adds an average of $1 million to the cost of a cyberattack, and attacks where remote work was involved take over 50 days longer to contain than attacks on company premises. 

With Geeq Data, attestations, metadata, and hash digests are stored on chains dedicated to your organization, accessible via an API. That means the organization can grant access to someone to use Geeq Data without allowing them inside the company’s firewall. Geeq Data gives organizations flexibility to grant or revoke access to write or view the data on the chain. 

For certain distributed workflows, especially for geographically dispersed organizations, Geeq Data adds an entirely new way to receive and validate data from external addresses while keeping the data within the firewall under its normal lock and key.  These solutions also solve data trust issues for companies who frequently work with external vendors or experience sudden changes in staffing.

Reducing supply chain vulnerabilities

Supply chains are a common target for cyberattacks, with nearly one-fifth of all cybersecurity losses globally arising from a breach of a supply chain partner. The average cost of a supply chain compromise to a firm stands at around $4.5 million. Attackers typically exploit vulnerabilities in EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) data flows using methods such as identity fraud – or, in one audacious case, by launching a ransomware attack on an EDI provider itself. 

Geeq Data attestations create more trust between supply chain partners by allowing all parties access to a single point of information regarding the provenance and location of goods. Moreover, Geeq makes integrating with your established enterprise supply chain infrastructure easy since it’s a stand alone layer that provides secure, time-consistent, neutrally validated transactions between partners. In the event of a breach on one side or the other, records from involved parties can be cross-checked against the provably unchanged Geeq Data records to restore the correct version of events. 

Being able to identify supply chain data breaches quickly and direct resources in a targeted way through Geeq Data introduces a uniquely new tool to ensure data integrity.  The ability to mitigate downside risk is a key to making supply chains more resilient. Best of all, the permissioning available for enterprise Geeq chains means any company is in control of who has access to their data.

Enhanced oversight of the enterprise data landscape

Given what’s at stake, perhaps the most surprising statistic is that only 5 percent of company files and folders are properly protected against cyber attackers. A report from cybersecurity firm Varonis uncovered that many firms are struggling to maintain oversight and control of their data, hoarding vast amounts of stale or overexposed data in legacy folders, documents, and systems that create an unquantifiable degree of risk. 

Data attestations provide a way for firms to gain better oversight of their data and prevent it from becoming vulnerable due to a lack of visibility in siloed or legacy systems. Geeq Data improves the consistency of implementing data governance across all departments and enterprise platforms, allowing a macro view of the organization’s data landscape as well as improving the ability to demonstrate compliance, a topic worthy of several articles and hundreds of use cases on its own.
Are you ready to up your cybersecurity game with Geeq Data?

To discover more, visit the homepage.

Geeq takes a unique approach to blockchain that is designed to make it quick and easy to prove the reliability of data, while avoiding smart contracts. But what does this mean in practice? These three use cases illustrate Geeq’s power. 

The largest blockchain networks currently offer great flexibility. Through relatively rudimentary data structures coupled with smart contracts, developers can create tools for a wide variety of use cases. However, this approach involves trade-offs. 

Smart contracts introduce a lot of complexity into Web3 systems, which leads to security risks, and makes it more difficult to establish generic, consistent and verifiable datasets that can be linked with existing enterprise software and data systems. 

Geeq takes a different approach. By using a richer underlying data system and avoiding smart contracts, Geeq excels at tasks like verifying the reliability of data and proving the chain of custody of documents and information. That means we’re better at delivering the crucial value added that blockchain can offer. In addition, thanks to more contextual information and optional metadata, it is a lot easier to integrate with existing Web2 data systems – meaning we’ve done away with a barrier to adoption. Here are three examples of what Geeq can do in the real world. 

1. Data reliability without the pain

It’s a safe bet that any large corporation will have a large data headache. With databases going back decades and new information flooding in from all sides, it rapidly becomes impossible to find exactly what you need, and to be sure that it is correct and up to date. When different departments need to collaborate, or outside partners are involved, it gets even more complicated. But sorting out the mess normally requires an extensive, and expensive, enterprise data integration project. Many organizations may need faster results, at lower cost, especially given the drag involved in trying to win approval for such a large commitment.   

This is where Geeq Data shines. We provide a stand-alone data layer that validates transactions seamlessly from any permissioned source. Enterprises may use our APIs to construct their version of a Geeq Data explorer. A block explorer is crucial for visibility into your blockchain data.  Geeq Data’s attestation service comes equipped to introduce metadata so it will display search results related to a query that feels natural to users.

The blockchains may exist in servers outside your firewall – or inside if that is more convenient for you. It is your choice either way.  For a private blockchain, Geeq’s protocol filters out data sent from unauthorized users, so a non-permissioned source cannot corrupt the data.

Finally, unlike smart contract networks that charge transaction fees any time you process data, Geeq places the focus on-chain validation and off-chain processing. This provides robust guarantees on the validity of data while greatly reducing cost and minimizing disruption to existing workflows.

2. Provable provenance

On paper, the logistics sector is an ideal use case for blockchain; supply chains form complex networks of dependencies with multiple disparate parties and a low level of trust. And yet, so far, efforts to introduce blockchain solutions tend to get stuck at the proof-of-concept stage. The most prominent of these, the TradeLens platform backed by IBM and Maersk, was retired in November with the companies saying it had failed to win traction in an industry slow to adopt new technologies. 

Given these challenges, why should we succeed? Because Geeq doesn’t require big changes. Instead, we deliver big benefits, with very little effort or investment required from the user. Geeq’s unique enterprise NFT solution offers a way to track goods through the entire supply chain: transparently, securely, inexpensively, and with the same easy discoverability provided by Geeq Data. The tracked item is digitally represented as a unique, transferable token that gets passed along the chain together with the goods themselves, providing an intuitive and immutable record of the chain of custody. One of the great benefits of the Geeq NFT is that it can decouple the transfer of ownership from the physical transfer, speeding up business processes by knowing who has the legal power to negotiate with whom. 

That’s the second part of our 2-in-1 NFT innovation: on-chain ownership is directly connected to legally recognized property rights, providing real-world certainty with digital convenience. It’s inexpensive, simple, and extremely useful.

3. Transparency in AI training 

As machine learning grows in importance and impact, we expect to see increasing pressure on companies to “show their work” – in the form of publicly documenting the data sets their AI is trained on. Both regulators and customers will expect accountability, and we are ready to help.

Our collaboration with Rowbot is a great example. Rowbot’s enterprise data platform incorporates machine learning analytics that can generate powerful business benefits. With the integration of Geeq Data, this means users can access their data, leverage AI for insights and document the training set internally, with indisputable proof ready if they are later required to share their results externally, all on one no-code platform. 

Curious? Our CEO Stephanie So discussed this and other use cases with Rowbot CEO Matt Linton; you can view the conversation here. 

Thanks for reading! And please share this article with anyone who would like a quick overview of Geeq, or just get in touch if you or your business would like to benefit from our solution.

– The Geeq Team

ESG is becoming a “must have” for organizations. But how can you prove that you really walk the walk? To take full advantage of your ESG investment, data management and consistency is key.  

Not so long ago, an environmental and social governance (ESG) policy was considered to be a “nice-to-have” marker of corporate culture. By communicating that ESG was important to your business, you could win customer goodwill and boost employee morale. The specifics of ESG were fuzzy and ill-defined, however, and many regarded it purely as an expense, akin to philanthropy.  

ESG — a regulatory imperative

In the past decade, the picture has rapidly changed. What was an optional side project has become both a regulatory necessity and a strategic opportunity for firms. In 2014, the EU passed a directive which requires companies to include standardized information about non-financial factors in their reports. The scope of the reporting requirements is continuously expanding, but existing and draft regulations cover factors such as environmental sustainability, employment conditions, observance of human rights, anti-corruption measures, and board diversity. In the US, the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) announced in March this year that it was introducing similar requirements for public companies in relation to standardized climate disclosures.    

Beyond compliance: the benefits of ESG

However, ESG should not be viewed purely through the lens of compliance: it presents significant opportunities too. Building a trustworthy and demonstrable track record as a leader in the field of ESG can help a firm foster brand loyalty among existing clients and reach out to younger generations of millennial and GenZ consumers, for whom climate action is a particularly high priority. In terms of reputation management, by playing a leading role in adopting ESG measures, you can also raise the credibility, stature and influence of your firm among both media organizations and governmental bodies.

Adopting ESG measures often makes good business sense too. In endeavoring to reduce the extraction of raw materials and use fewer resources, for instance, you can decrease costs and increase efficiency. By creating a safe working environment for employees and paying fair wages, you can increase the satisfaction and productivity of your workforce. It can also have a direct effect on stock market performance due to the growing tendency for investors to take ESG factors into account when building their portfolios. Furthermore, all of the big three credit rating agencies — Moody’s, Standard & Poor’s, and Fitch — now incorporate ESG factors into their ratings.

The data challenges of ESG reporting

Collecting the relevant information for meaningful ESG reporting is a complex procedure, and standardizing it to allow proper analysis, with consistent, comparable data points, is even more challenging.

Take a clothing manufacturer, for example. A typical garment might contain cotton sourced in India, be manufactured in Bangladesh, and sold in the US. Relevant environmental criteria would include the sourcing of the cotton, carbon emissions during manufacturing, water usage, and the sustainability of packaging. Social criteria would encompass factors such as the safety measures at the factory and the pay and conditions offered to workers. Finally, governance indicators could involve metrics such as the diversity of the firm’s board, and the degree of transparency of its financial practices.

The indicators relevant to ESG assessment often require a wide array of data, some of which has not previously been actively managed. ESG performance covers a multitude of factors that are hard to measure, and which stem from multiple, largely unstructured sources across an organization (and even outside it). Supply chain data is a crucial input, but so are records from HR, investments, facilities management, and many others. The data may need to be collected from various sites, and from external suppliers as well as subsidiaries; it may even need to be reconstructed or sourced from independent data providers. In addition, it may come in formats that are hard to quantify, such as emails, photos, satellite imagery, customer feedback, and contracts.

This can add up to quite a messy picture. When implemented effectively, ESG reporting should help a firm to set measurable goals and track improvement. But poor data quality does not lend itself to robust reporting and ESG management. Furthermore, ambiguity or inconsistencies between data records could quickly lead to accusations of “greenwashing” in today’s consumer and media environment.

Towards ESG-friendly data management

As recently argued at COP26, data forms the basis of a strong ESG program. Consistent, clear, well-sourced data is a prerequisite for good ESG practice. With standardized, reliable, accessible data at your fingertips, you can make better decisions faster. And given that ESG relates to so many business areas, and is important to so many stakeholders, adopting ESG-friendly data practices will make for better management and a stronger market position.

To be prepared for regulation and make the most of ESG investment, organizations need to establish strong data management practices across the board. If ESG falls under the CFO’s remit, as is often the case, the finance department’s data lifecycle management processes and tools will be useful. But given the wide variability of data types and sources, it will not be easy to simply apply finance rules to these multifaceted and unstructured records. To create an efficient ESG data management solution, it is necessary to establish data reliability and consistency at source, and enable discoverability.

Geeq — a lightweight, modular approach to ESG data management

Geeq Data was developed to meet this need. It’s a lightweight, easy-to-use tool that provides a data consistency layer that may be accessed by connecting all organizational units, with strict permissioning if desired.

Geeq Data allows organizations to prove the consistency of their data through time. Best of all, it does not require integration with existing information systems and may be automated in order not to disturb workflows.

Data is formatted in messages, called transactions, and sent to a Geeq blockchain. Each record may be tagged with user-defined metadata (such as the data source and owner, or labels to connect data or data ownership to the relevant reporting area), while the record itself is hashed and written to the blockchain. A hash is a form of one-way compression – it can be used to confirm whether two separate records are identical, thus verifying data consistency.

With greater certainty as to the provenance and reliability of records, and easy discoverability, it becomes much easier to find, harmonize and structure information.

Once validated, unstructured data can now be fit into a relevant framework and fed into reports, whether manually or through the use of automated tools. The CFO office can organize ESG-relevant data and provide a real-time information base to support decision making and auditing. The immutability and security of the blockchain provides an added layer of trust for consumers, suppliers and regulatory bodies alike. Your organization will be better equipped to make meaningful improvements based on measurable goals, meet regulatory demands, and reap the branding, reputational, operational and financial benefits from your ESG investment.

All through one, simple modular solution. Learn more about Geeq Data today.

Welcome to the efficient world of applications powered by Geeq.

Geeq Addresses a Major Pain Point in the Blockchain Industry

Blockchain technology has come from a tradition where transactions are settled on a main chain, which is an approach that inevitably leads to difficulties in maintaining security while scaling. Let’s explain the problem from a bird’s eye level.

As long as all blockchain transactions ultimately must be resolved on a main chain, the only option is to introduce mechanisms that operate separately which then must be anchored back into the main chain.

Roll-ups are a category of proposed scaling solutions, which may be suitable for some applications and not others. Roll-ups bundle transactions into a smaller unit that is submitted to the main chain. Another common solution is to form separate blockchains to accept transactions, e.g. layer 2’s, subnets, side chains, etc. Yet another is to bridge disparate blockchain ecosystems.

When any new scaling solution is introduced, new attack surfaces are also introduced. While each solution provides the ability to accept or cross-reference more transactions, they must be vetted for how well they prove they are secure independently, as well as how they affect the “shared security” of their respective ecosystems.

Why is it Crucial to Examine How Blockchains Scale?

At Geeq, we believe:

The primary economic value of a blockchain is to provide a dependable data set that is acceptable to all parties who wish to coordinate on some, but not all, dimensions with each other and do not wish to trust a third party.

In order for users to believe any system with a main chain is dependable, they must believe their transactions were validated properly by the scaling method that is used and their transactions were transmitted through each touchpoint intact, with any and all errors corrected.

To be honest, we don’t think users care what scaling method is used, as long as the final state of their transactions are correctly and reliably validated where they need them. Users care about their own safety and well-being, not about how much effort has gone into developing the technology or even the total value of assets entrusted to that system. The question is, can blockchain technology scale without breaking?

Geeq’s Revolutionary Solution Provides Scalability and Security

The only way users can have absolute certainty is to be provided with unambiguous proof that their transactions have been validated correctly on-chain, without having to take a centralized power’s word for it. This is where Geeq’s technology shines.

Geeq is a multi-chain ecosystem, a “forest of chains” where each chain has its own network of nodes and every chain follows the same rules, set by Geeq’s patented and secure protocol. Every transaction is validated separately and a user can drill down to see a proof for their particular transaction.

Every transaction is validated separately and a user can drill down to see a proof for their particular transaction.

Geeq scales by launching another blockchain, thus different chains in this forest may have different heights. The forest may grow without limit, without spillovers from throughput or cost, and without contagion, because each chain stands on its own.

Thus, applications powered by Geeq never have to worry about connections to a main chain or what is happening on any other chain.

Therefore, every transaction is settled directly on-chain at Geeq.

Geeq’s users do not have to trust – as they would in a complex ecosystem – that layers of safeguards are working in tandem to protect them. This is because Geeq chains are simple and efficient, by design.

Geeq’s Elegant Architecture for dApps

Users of Geeq dApps can send as many transactions as they like. Transactions are sent to a node for any blockchain running a specific dApp. There may be many such Geeq chains.

Each node keeps two blockchains for each dApp. Every block constructed for the validation blockchain will have a corresponding block constructed for the application blockchain.

Here we show the first block at a node after the genesis block: Block 1 at block height 1.

Transactions are validated and written to a validation block, using Geeq’s patented leaderless protocol.

To recap: each transaction sent to a dApp is supported by a pair of Geeq chains and is validated by Geeq’s industry-leading secure protocol, and settled on-chain. No roll-ups, extra layers, or bridges are required.

Building a Geeq dApp: The Example of Geeq Data

When the user sends a dApp transaction to the node, the webapp prompts the user to provide the required information to process that transaction.

For example, Geeq Data requires several elements such as the targeted block, chain, and node. Depending on the webapp developer’s preferences, these may be automatically pre-filled for the user and the developer may choose which types of data to support.

For simplicity, we pre-filled much of the form for the test-net that was released to the community. We chose to support .pdf and .jpg files. The user uploads a hash of their file. They also upload user-provided metadata. We chose to make the first field of metadata required so users could search the block explorer.

To see the four steps of using this Geeq Data webapp, here is a short video. There are no smart contracts required. All of the blockchain back end is invisible to the user, and the dApp itself may be written in any language that is comfortable for webapp developers.

Parallel Geeq Chains – How They’re Made

Once the transactions are validated for a block, Geeq’s protocol separates each application data payload from the rest of its message

All the data payloads are data for the corresponding application block

The node then constructs the corresponding application block.

The two Geeq chains that support a dApp are built in parallel.

While these blocks are built, the nodes continue to collect other transactions. Once the block is built, the process repeats. Moving on to Block 2!

Every Geeq-native dApp is supported this way. This dApp is on its way to growing two trees in Geeq’s forest of chains.

No smart contracts!
No roll-ups!
Nothing complicated!

We hope you enjoyed this and would like to learn more.

– The Geeq Team

In a globalized world where we rely on imports to meet many of our basic needs, reliable supply chain data is pivotal to the efficiency of the global economy. Data must be not only secure, but also time-consistent. Geeq recently partnered with Morpheus.Network, a middleware platform that helps logistics providers harness the benefits of blockchain. Here, we lay out in detail the sector’s specific challenges, and how Geeq fits in.

For many consumers, just-in-time delivery has become an integral part of their everyday lives. With a few clicks, we can order extra groceries online and they arrive on our doorstep within days or even hours. But when we walk into a store and take a product off the shelf, we rarely think about the vast and delicate web of logistical connections that brought it there.

Supply chains: essential to the modern economy

Our economies and consumption habits now rely heavily on the global supply chain. Take the banana, for instance, a delicate tropical fruit that was still considered a rare delicacy at the turn of the 20th century. Despite needing to be hand-picked and then shipped in refrigerated containers for thousands of miles, it is now the most widely consumed fruit in both the US and Europe.

This is a trend that is mirrored in manufacturing. As liberal market economies like the US and UK have specialized in service industries and shed manufacturing jobs since the 1970s, the scale of the imports required to meet domestic consumption habits has grown. This is reflected by the US balance of payments deficit for goods, which stood at $1,090.7 billion in the period between 2020 and 2021.

But this is not about any one country in isolation. In a globalized world, we are all more dependent than ever before on the international supply chain to meet our existential needs. A simple, everyday item like a T-shirt, for example, might go from cotton farm, to mill, to factory, to warehouse provider before finally reaching the retailer – with each step in the supply chain in a different country, or even a different continent. This complexity became particularly apparent during the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent supply squeeze, in which goods including computer chips, pharmaceuticals, lumber and many other products and materials fell into short supply.

This is not about any one country in isolation. In a globalized world, we are all more dependent than ever before on the international supply chain to meet our existential needs.

This complexity became particularly apparent during the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent supply squeeze, in which goods including computer chips, pharmaceuticals, lumber and many other products and materials fell into short supply.

Digitization: despite progress, problems persist

In recent decades, businesses have made progress towards making supply chains more automated and efficient. Within organizations, significant investments have been made into enterprise resource planning (ERP) software to make processes and workflows relating to procurement, project management and supply chain operations more efficient. Furthermore, international quality management standards such as ISO 9001 have made it easier for countries to trade with each other according to common guidelines and standardized requirements.

But while businesses have made considerable headway addressing internal barriers to supply chain efficiency, the connections between stakeholders along the chain — such as businesses, vendors, shipping companies and regulatory authorities — remain relatively fragmented. Stakeholders often rely on differing, incompatible data systems, which complicates the handover of goods from one party to another at warehouses, ports and airports.

In addition, manual, paper-based documentation remains common. Shipping is the backbone of global trade, with an estimated 90% of goods traveling by water. But the industry still relies on the centuries-old concept of the bill of lading — a document detailing the cargo, origin and destination of goods, 40% of which are still transferred via paper records. Other commonly required documents for each shipping transaction include:

• a bill of exchange that details the amount the buyer needs to pay for the goods
• a promissory note signed by one of the parties to the transaction committing to pay the stated sum of money
• a ship’s delivery order issued by the carrier of the cargo that instructs the port operator to hand over the cargo on arrival
• a warehouse receipt detailing the quality and quantity of goods
• a mate’s receipt signed by the ship’s officer indicating that the goods have been received and are ready for loading
• marine and cargo insurance policies
  

While efforts have been made by legislators in the EU, UK and elsewhere to digitize trade documentation to increase efficiency, digitization also entails cybersecurity risks. The broad patchwork of software and data systems currently in use provides a wide range of potential attack surfaces for cybercriminals and other rogue actors, with any network only as strong as its weakest link.

The broad patchwork of software and data systems currently in use provides a wide range of potential attack surfaces for cybercriminals and other rogue actors, with any network only as strong as its weakest link.

Data integrity is paramount to consumer confidence

With so many points in the chain where data is transferred, anomalies become increasingly likely. Take a case where a medical device is being imported, for instance. To meet regulatory requirements, the manufacturer needs to be able to monitor and document the entire chain of custody from source to destination, with all handoffs clearly documented — from the manufacturing plant, warehouses, docks, and delivery depots, to the final recipient.

In numerous respects, blockchain technology is well suited to these types of supply chain cases. By creating a reliable and neutral store of information that all stakeholders can access and trust, everyone can trace the provenance and custody chain of goods. In addition, blockchain networks produce data redundancy by default, with each full node typically keeping a copy of the entire transaction history of the chain. This makes blockchain networks resilient against most conventional forms of cyberattack.

Geeq Data gives supply chain stakeholders additional assurance for off-chain data by providing a simple, non-intrusive way of continuously recording attestations for information that enters a datasystem. In the event of a cybersecurity breach, either internally or at another vendor in the supply chain, all records can be cross-checked against records in a node that is provably unchanged, in order to flag inconsistencies and help restore the original data (with the confidence these data were validated neutrally in the first place).

Using Geeq Data, every transaction receives a durable cryptographic proof of inclusion in a block, which can be connected at any point in the future to a provably correct chain state. No other blockchain offers this level of confidence.

The relationships between supply chain partners are often multifaceted. Two companies may simultaneously cooperate in one sector of the market while competing in another. As a result, businesses may wish to carefully control what information is accessible to other supply chain stakeholders to prevent commercially sensitive data from being revealed. Geeq Data can be deployed on a private blockchain instance and includes a fine-grained permissioning system to stipulate which data is available to whom.

For accurate recordkeeping and auditability, the time consistency of supply chain records is also of crucial importance. In the event that the wrong device is delivered, all stakeholders need to be able to clearly trace who had the goods at which time. Some blockchains have block confirmation times ranging from a few minutes to multiple hours, which could lead to confusion in the chain of custody, particularly when there are multiple handovers within a short space of time.

Geeq Data provides a reliable, time-consistent data layer that ensures stakeholders can always be sure that the original records concerning the order of events and the sequence of handovers can be identified. This increases the transparency of the supply chain and makes the lines of accountability clearer, making it easier to identify and rectify discrepancies.

Coping with complexity

Human society is fundamentally characterized by interdependence – from our earliest beginnings, ingenuity and cooperation have been the keys to survival. Nowhere is this interdependence more apparent than in the global supply chain, a complex web of interactions that provides us with everything from clothes and computers, to food.

The data systems that underpin the global supply chain were already in need of reform on efficiency grounds. But recent global events and the resulting supply squeeze have made that need even more pressing. Through our partnership with Morpheus.Network, we aim to play a small, yet vital role in making supply chain logistics more transparent and dependable.

You can discover more about Geeq Data and its benefits for supply chain operations on our wehttps://geeq.io/supply-chain-management/bsite.

Geeq Data harnesses elements of blockchain to introduce a more comprehensive, cost-effective, reliable, and neutral set of assurances than has ever been possible. It does so, in essence, by cutting through the red tape and creating a permanent, easily searchable record of attestations for data.

In doing so, Geeq Data reduces the need for coordination, creates a record for provenance, divides the work of record-keeping, and creates a resource that is readily available to anyone with permission to access it.

Geeq Data is bringing you the power to certify your own documents and data. It is an attestation service that shows how Geeq’s blockchain technology provides solutions to problems that arise when responsibility for data integrity falls through the cracks or there aren’t enough resources to authenticate and verify every piece of data manually.

Data integrity is an issue that can cost businesses as much as 25% of revenue. As cybersecurity attacks worsen, even redundant backups may become useless if you do not have confidence the data are unchanged. With Geeq Data’s provable security, it is possible to identify which backups have been contaminated, which ones have data integrity, and how to narrow the scope of any necessary recovery efforts.

Lines of responsibility for data ownership also are becoming harder to maintain as the volume of data increases and interactions grow exponentially. Miscommunications or mishandling of data responsibilities can be the sources of rifts at work, breaches of privacy, liability, and worse. Geeq Data introduces clarity to those situations in a highly efficient and non-intrusive way.

As an individual, trying to trace data integrity and track down who is responsible for which data can be overwhelming. Too often it feels like you are lost and on your own, not knowing who to contact, how to find them, or when they might help you.

Geeq Data is a private blockchain solution that’s designed to work with your data systems with a light touch.

Data that is put on the blockchain can be ingested into your existing centralized data systems, but with that Geeq Data layer, it still allows you to share that data in a way that is credible to all of your various partners.

A common misconception is that blockchain is a fundamentally expensive solution. It’s really only expensive because of the mechanisms of consensus.

Geeq has a mechanism that uses very few resources computationally and otherwise. Thousands of transactions can be put in the block chain per second, at the cost of a hundredth of a cent or less.

Blockchain is not a solution to every problem, but it is a solution to certain problems that cannot be solved in a centralized way. Those problems primarily revolve around the issue of trust and integrity and people wishing to be empowered, instead of being controlled by one centralized authority.

We think that Geeq can provide a solution to a lot of problems you may not even know you have.
As you can see we are very enthusiastic about the possibilities that Geeq offers.

Traditionally, in order to prove something to someone who might not trust you, you’d need to find a witness (such as a notary public or government official) to corroborate your claim and certify you are who you say you are. You’d need to bring your identification and take the time to meet someone physically. The entire process could be stressful, time-consuming and expensive. If you find out afterwards that you need a new piece of information, you would have to go through the entire process again.

When a business goes through an audit, has to comply with regulations, or enters legal discovery, the disruption to the business can be even more time-consuming and costly. It is always better to have your official documents organized so the integrity of your data is easy to establish and clear lines of responsibility are already in place. Geeq Data is a new tool that helps enterprises to organize or automate supporting documentation in real time, easily, in a way that gives you the ability to find and prove your claims at any time in the future.

Then, there are the problems that have gone unresolved because this entire process has been too difficult to incorporate into our daily routines. How many times have you let things go because it was too hard to produce credible proof for your point of view? For example, have you ever let a client underpay you even though you knew she was wrong, because it’s her word against yours and you didn’t want to lose her business? Have you ever watched a boss or colleague make a plan destined for failure, but you knew your enterprise did not collect the evidence that could convince them to change course?

We’ve all had times when we’ve had to make compromises because we didn’t think there was a way to turn those situations around. Well, help has arrived in the form of the Geeq Data app.

Geeq Data reduces the costs of discovering and sharing contemporaneous attestations and it is possible precisely because of the security features of Geeq’s extraordinary blockchain technology. In addition, the app itself is simple to use and easy to access. We hope you will share with us all the ways you might use Geeq Data to improve your life, so we can work to make all of it happen. For everyone.

In the past few years, enterprise attitudes to blockchain have changed rapidly. The overwhelming majority believe blockchain adoption is necessary to maintain a competitive advantage in their business. If they’re not already implementing blockchain, they’re preparing to do so. However, actual rates of adoption lag these attitudes substantially, and sentiment varied greatly across regions.

Right now, around half of all enterprise blockchain deployments are private. That’s like agreeing the internet is a vast resource – and building a company intranet instead of accessing the world wide web. Sure, it’s useful and it looks similar, but there’s so much missing! Why are organizations limiting themselves like this?

The “blockchain trilemma” as a hurdle for adoption

The traditional challenge of blockchain design is how to optimize performance for a particular user group’s needs, while incorporating desirable – and sometimes competing – characteristics associated with blockchain: security, decentralization and scalability.

The idea of decentralization, in particular, has given enterprises pause. Given the dramatic events and heated debates in the past ten years of the blockchain space, public blockchain adoption has had to be weighed against the potential disruption of their security systems, while needing to continue handling their business transactions at scale.

Enterprises have ongoing operational concerns, as well as fiduciary, commercial, and legal reasons to be conservative about their choices in data services. For those who have entered the blockchain race in the recent past, private blockchains have seemed to offer the safest and most reliable options.

Private blockchain offerings remain highly centralized

Centralized solutions offer the comfort of familiarity when adopting a new technology. Most enterprises already have responses in place for the known knowns of dealing with central points of failure.

Businesses are already under pressure to protect sensitive information and must ensure reliable performance. As this is a top priority, the natural reaction for executives with decision making power is to choose the option that gives them more control: private blockchains.

In doing so, they forgo the most innovative potential at the heart of a full enterprise blockchain solution. However, these decisions have been rational. As yet, there have not been dramatic, consistent demonstrations of public blockchain’s transformative power in enterprise settings.

On public networks, large transaction volumes can result in slow performance, unpredictable fees, and the threat of high energy usage. Furthermore, there has not been a one-stop shop for adoption of performant and easy to use solutions that deliver the best features of private and public blockchains.

A new technology has arrived

Geeq has the solution. Geeq’s modular construction means enterprises may expand blockchain adoption as needed, now and in the future. Determined to provide practical and sustainable solutions from inception, Geeq’s protocols are light years ahead on security, with ultra-low financial and environmental costs. In addition, Geeq’s structure provides tremendous flexibility and scalability.

Geeq anticipated the move away from a single monolithic blockchain system with a unique, multi-chain, scalable design. Geeq’s architecture provides a more secure and consistently reliable alternative to sidechains and Layer 2s: every Geeq chain uses the same efficient protocols and benefits from Geeq’s cutting-edge security.

Understanding blockchain technology involves a deep dive into a highly technical world. Geeq has resurfaced with elegant, ground-breaking solutions that provide firmly grounded, easy to interpret and simple to use endpoints – for users of enterprise software and consumer applications.

The right choice for you

The natural consequence of Geeq’s design and engineering choices is its ability to offer a range of blockchain solutions. Enterprises may use purely private blockchains that are more future-forward, secure, efficient, and sustainable. Geeq’s public chains are launched with the ability to boostrap themselves into fully decentralized blockchains, without intervention.

Finally, Geeq offers enterprise solutions to combine the strengths of both public and private chains, delivering the opportunity to enjoy the best of both worlds in the same ecosystem.

Geeq simply provides better blockchain solutions. We built these systems with the specific pain points of adoption in mind, so enterprises can access the full benefits of blockchain without compromise. Blockchains have made big promises. Geeq delivers.

The purpose of Geeq Data is to make it simple for people to point to the same entry for a piece of data so that everyone can get on the same page. It is easier to make a plan, settle a dispute, and prevent confusion if everyone involved knows where to start.

Geeq Data is a webapp that gives you the ability to certify your own data. In this version, the webapp supports documents in .pdf format and images in .jpg format up to 8 MB. The formats that Geeq Data accepts have little to do with the blockchain and more to do with the front end of the app.

To the blockchains themselves, it does not matter what the original data look like, so the Geeq Data app itself is completely generic. The size limit we’ve imposed in the Testing Framework is arbitrary and purely for convenience.

Of course, Geeq’s strength is to provide the technology. Different users are welcome to customize their own displays, write their own apps, and integrate the technology into their own dashboards. This testing framework is to show how that process would work as well as test the technology itself.

What is a blockchain-based web app?

The app is a piece of software that takes the information you enter, formats it, asks for your cryptographic signature, and sends it as a transaction to a node in the Geeq Data’s blockchain network.

There are Geeq blockchains involved on the back end. Geeq’s blockchain technology provides especially strong security guarantees. That means when transactions are validated by a Geeq-native app like Geeq Data, users can check independently (more formally, they can prove) whether the data they have in front of them is the same data that was previously submitted.

To summarize, the Geeq Data app provides a reliable, fast, and easily accessible way to submit and self-certify the transactions you send to the Geeq Data blockchains.

It is worth noting that Geeq Data does not depend on smart contracts. It works on the streamlined logic already built into the basic code. Building Geeq-native apps means the code and processes are standardized, predictable, efficient and far more secure, because smart contracts tend to open up new attack vectors and are vulnerable to exploits.

How will Geeq Data improve your life?

Traditionally, in order to prove something to someone who might not trust you, you’d need to find a witness (such as a notary public or government official) to corroborate your claim and certify you are who you say you are. You’d need to bring your identification and take the time to meet someone physically. The entire process could be stressful, time-consuming and expensive. If you find out afterwards that you need a new piece of information, you would have to go through the entire process again.

When a business goes through an audit, has to comply with regulations, or enters legal discovery, the disruption to the business can be even more time-consuming and costly. It is always better to have your official documents organized so the integrity of your data is easy to establish and clear lines of responsibility are already in place. Geeq Data is a new tool that helps enterprises to organize or automate supporting documentation in real time, easily, in a way that gives you the ability to find and prove your claims at any time in the future.

Then, there are the problems that have gone unresolved because this entire process has been too difficult to incorporate into our daily routines. How many times have you let things go because it was too hard to produce credible proof for your point of view? For example, have you ever let a client underpay you even though you knew she was wrong, because it’s her word against yours and you didn’t want to lose her business? Have you ever watched a boss or colleague make a plan destined for failure, but you knew your enterprise did not collect the evidence that could convince them to change course?

We’ve all had times when we’ve had to make compromises because we didn’t think there was a way to turn those situations around. Well, help has arrived in the form of the Geeq Data app.

Geeq Data reduces the costs of discovering and sharing contemporaneous attestations and it is possible precisely because of the security features of Geeq’s extraordinary blockchain technology. In addition, the app itself is simple to use and easy to access. We hope you will share with us all the ways you might use Geeq Data to improve your life, so we can work to make all of it happen. For everyone.

No. For the purposes of this app (and most blockchain apps), it does not make sense to write large amounts of data to a block. Remember, blockchains are append-only data structures, which means they are always growing. Writing a lot of data to a block can cause blockchain “bloat” which then can lead to a cascade of problems.

First, writing a lot of data to a blockchain can raise significant issues about storage and upkeep. The larger a blockchain gets, the harder it becomes for some nodes to keep copies. If fewer nodes participate in the network, access to services may shrink. We want to avoid all of that.

Also, the actual documents and data exist in more conventional data management systems, such as your file manager. Blockchains are not intended to replace existing data systems that already work well at what they can do.

Blockchain apps like Geeq Data are able to provide new and complementary functions that have not been possible before. Geeq blockchains are ideal for proving you had the data in that exact format, at the time you submitted your transaction to the blockchain. The app simply helps you to use this new technology in ways that users are used to interacting with old technology.

If the data itself is not written to the blockchain, what is?

The Geeq Data app asks you to select and upload a file. The app then uses a hash function to hash the file, which produces a non-invertible 256 bit binary string called a hash digest, regardless of the size of the original file.

Running the same file through the hash function always gives the same string. Running any other file through the hash function, no matter how similar, returns a different string.

Even though the hash digest is discoverable and visible on the Block Explorer, it is essentially impossible to guess the data which generated the hash digest. The only way to know what the hash digest represents is to have the same original document, hash it, and see if the hashes match. In fact, this is a straightforward way for different parties to check whether the document they have matches the one that was submitted officially. Every person can do that independently without consulting anyone else (unless there are permissioning structures in place).

Efficiency matters

A transaction on this version of Geeq Data, including the hash of the file and the metadata, is less than 1 kB (which is very small). Geeq’s developers are producing efficient, straightforward, and highly secure processes. Geeq Data also scales through multiple chains and is quite fast: blocks are written every 10 seconds, all transactions are settled on-chain, and the corresponding application block is appended when the new validation block is appended.

Like labels on file folders, notes on memos, subject headings in emails, variable names and definitions in databases, metadata are used to describe the data you are certifying.

The Geeq Data app provides space for you to add metadata to describe the hash digest of your document. Together, the hash digest and metadata make up what is called the “data payload” of your transaction. When your transaction is validated and included in a block in the app’s Validation Layer Blockchain (VLB), the data payload is written in the corresponding block in the app’s Application Layer Blockchain (ALB).

In summary, applications powered by Geeq are supported by two parallel, simultaneously constructed Geeq chains.

Anyone with permission to use the Block Explorer will be able to search the blockchain. Metadata can make these searches easier.

For the private instance of Geeq Data, released for public testing, the first metadata field was required and the rest are optional. Metadata are entered as strings of characters in the Geeq Data app. Unlike the hash of the document, which never overtly reveals its contents, the metadata will be displayed in the Block Explorer as they were entered in the Geeq Data app.

If the user writes the metadata in cleartext, it will be displayed clearly in the Block Explorer to anyone who finds it. If the user encrypts the metadata, the encrypted metadata still will be visible – however, the only users who will understand what they mean will be those who know how to decrypt them.

The general point of being able to choose how and when to use encryption, even while blockchain tends to make transactions more transparent and visible, is often misunderstood by those who might be afraid of the word “transparency”. Actually, we have many options at our disposal, in this process of developing Geeq’s blockchain applications.

Another way to add privacy is to add permissioning structures that determine who is allowed to send transactions and who is allowed to access the Block Explorer. Geeq offers permissioning structures for its enterprise clients. Partner with us!

Introduction

The wide applicability of Geeq Data‘s attestation service is possible because of its simple, generic design. Geeq has developed a unique and new technology, tailor-made for easy adoption, real-time auditability and regulatory compliance.

From manufacturing to finance, healthcare and more, data are subject to audit by regulatory bodies. Enterprises bear large costs to comply, be prepared for an audit, or both. Read on for a brief hypothetical to help the aviation industry navigate these challenges.

The Challenge: A Demanding Regulatory Environment

The aviation manufacturing industry is regulated in the US by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). Manufacturers are subject to FAA requirements from start to finish: from design proposals to Quality System Audits of the production process and facilities.

Some safety and certification regulations are mandatory, while other safety guidelines are recommended. As in any regulatory environment, regulations are subject to change.

Progressing through this process means that aviation manufacturers may be required to produce credible evidence at any time, e.g. that specific components have been replaced at defined intervals and sourced from approved manufacturers. On top of this, aviation manufacturers must also navigate international certification authorities, a process which is subject to heavy time and education costs as bilateral agreements are negotiated.

A Motivation to Adopt Geeq Data:

According to a Global Market Forecast from Airbus, “In the next 20 years, Airbus forecasts the demand for new aircraft will progressively shift from fleet growth to accelerated replacement of older, less fuel-efficient aircraft. This will mean a need for over 39,000 new passenger and freighter aircraft, delivered over the next 20 years – around 15,250 of these will be for replacement of older less fuel efficient models.“

While the product-mix and service-orientation may change, using Geeq Data to streamline the process of data attestions remains the same. Geeq‘s entrepreneurial team has built a streamlined, non intrusive service, with easy adoption and seamless expansion in mind. With Geeq Data, enterprises will be able to reduce their costs for compliance and increase its readiness to respond to audits, regardless of how complex the regulatory environment or other market conditions change.

More information is available on the Geeq Data page, and a video walkthrough of a stripped down version, to show the essentials, while prompting you to imagine how these services may be customized.

Ready to discuss your use case? Join our community to discover more!

“If auto manufacturing were a country, it would be the sixth largest economy”, states the International Organization of Motor Vehicle Manufacturers. Deloitte Insights 2020 Report, “Industry 4.0 in Automotive: Digitizing the end-to-end value automotive value chain” discusses the pain auto manufacturers may face if the cost of “trying to keep multiple research and development (R&D) balls in the air at the same time”, largely self-funded in areas such as electric vehicles (EV), additive manufacturing (3D Printing), connected vehicles, and cybersecurity threat mitigation do not translate into prices consumers are willing to bear.

The Deloitte report identifies four paths to control the costs of technology improvement while attempting to stay relevant:

1. Cost-cutting, including “exit from entire vehicle categories”,
2. Acquiring technological expertise and technological startups rather than developing the technology in-house,
3. Spreading costs across players by forming strategic partnerships, and
4. Collaborating both inside and outside the industry with security experts and regulators to identify threats, develop standards, and work on infrastructure plans that will allow connected or semi-autonomous vehicles to provide consumer services safely.

Connected Vehicles are connected by Sensors (IoT), and Sensors generate Data

Because the Fourth Industrial Revolution is driven by “smart” technologies, the role of data is pivotal. There is no shortage of data generated as auto manufacturers strive to include the Internet of Things (IoT) in their connected vehicles. Autonomous driving features depend critically on feedback from IoT as well. Translation to actual road use, however, will require buy-in by regulators, auto manufacturers, and consumers alike. Many steps remain in between current R&D and adoption, including agreement on safety certifications and the communications technology infrastructure that will need to be available.

Fortunately, coordinating on these necessary requirements in a cost-effective way is one of the value propositions of using Geeq™ blockchain as a back-end data service for IoT.

Why Geeq blockchain?

Geeq’s blockchain platform is designed as a stand-alone, add-on data service for enterprise adoption, with security uppermost in mind. As manufacturers worry about cyberthreats, Geeq’s novel Proof of Honesty protocol introduces no new attack surfaces that could distort the reliability and integrity of the data logged in independent blockchain applications. Safety regulators and consumers alike will need reassurance that auto manufacturers are providing provably unaltered data. That’s exactly what Geeq™, above all other blockchain services, provides. For that reason alone, Geeq™ is poised to be a key player in the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Geeq’s enabling technology provides manufacturers with the ability to prove to regulators and consumers that they are providing unaltered data. For that reason alone, Geeq is poised to be a key player in the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

In addition, in keeping with manufacturers’ needs to reduce costs of record-keeping, Geeq estimates the costs of its IoT blockchain-based services to be extremely low.

If you are interested in the assumptions used and a breakdown of the cost calculations in the Table, those are stated here.

Conclusion

Technology, timing, execution and an ability to meet customers’ needs are keys to success in successful adoption. In the case of connected vehicles, the timing of auto manufacturers’ needs and Geeq’s blockchain is exceptionally well-matched. Geeq’s technology solves the problem that many manufacturers face as they try to keep up with the fast pace of innovation. With Geeq, manufacturers can:

• Outsource a secure blockchain data service without disrupting their own organizations,
• Commit to providing comparable data for regulators without having to form consortia or share data with competitors,
• Access cost-saving technology, and
• Reassure their own customers that their processes have maximized transparency with accountability.

To find out more about the experience of Geeq’s Team and our commitment to implementation with your interests in mind, we invite you to visit Geeq’s Team page. At Geeq, everyone in our public blockchain ecosystem wins when our services provide value. We look forward to growing with you.

1. Introduction

Quantity has its own quality. The telegraph was invented in the 1840’s, the telephone in 1876, and the Internet (through TCP/IC) in 1990. Each of these communications technologies was transformative in its own way. Of course, the number of telegrams, phone calls, and internet connections increased as costs came down. As costs continued to fall, however, qualitatively different uses for these technologies became feasible.

For example, the Internet was mainly confined to delivering emails and transferring text files between research universities in the beginning. As it became cheaper, it became practical to deliver web pages, graphics, audio and video content, and interactive games. Today, it is no longer necessary to buy physical copies of books, records, or movies. We don’t even need to store our personal files locally but can instead trust them to a cloud service. We can access any kind of information we want, from maps with real-time traffic conditions and reviews of the restaurant we happen to be walking by, to our bank balances and medical records. We can maintain constant contact with our friends and family. We can buy, sell, work, and even employ without ever leaving our homes. In other words, the cost of communications has gotten low enough that it has qualitatively changed our economy, our society, and created entirely new technologies and services that would have been difficult to even imagine before the era of ubiquitous connectivity.

Blockchain is at a similarly early point in its development. The two major public blockchains, Bitcoin and Ethereum, have a combined capacity of about ten to twelve transactions per second which implies something on the order of 350 million transactions can be processed per year. Costs range from a few cents to a few dollars per transaction.1 By way of comparison, PayPal processes approximately 10 billion transactions per year and the Visa network does about 100 billion. Of course transaction costs are also relatively high on these networks (on the scale of one to three percent of the transaction value) and neither use distributed ledger technology.

In this paper, we describe a vision for ubiquitous blockchain. We show how the technological approach used by The Geeq Project generates a scalability and cost structure that make use cases feasible that would otherwise be impossible. In turn, this enables qualitatively different ways to utilize information and interact as a society.

2. Physical Resource Requirements of GeeqChain

Readers may wish to skip the next two sections which detail how we calculate resource and economic costs of instances of GeeqChains and individual transactions. Readers interested primary is use cases are invited to skip to Sections 7 and 8.

The Ethereum network writes blocks about every ten seconds and processes around eight transactions per second (tps) for a total of approximately 250M transaction per year. The Bitcoin network writes blocks about every ten minutes and runs at around three tps for a total of approximately 100M transaction per year. GeeqChains can be configured to have different block writing intervals and to run at different speeds. Table 1 shows the number of transactions that an instance of GeeqChain can process per year depending on the speed that is chosen.

Table 1. Transactions per year at different speeds

Ethereum transactions are about .5kB on average although there is no fixed size. Ethereum transactions are often more complicated than simple token exchanges (interacting with smart contracts or placing documents in the blockchain, for example). Bitcoin transactions seem to be about 6kB on average but may include several individual payments as well as UTXOs. For the purposes of this paper, we will generally assume that a single GeeqChain transaction is .5kB on average. 2

There are 32,000 or so nodes on the Ethereum network and about 10,000 on the Bitcoin network. Tendermint, Delegated Proof of Stake, Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance and other PoS consensus mechanisms generally have 100 or fewer validating nodes, although they are often reinforced or staked by a larger number of users or other network participants. Hyperledger Fabric can accommodate several approaches to consensus, but often uses PoS or Proof of Authority networks with 25 or fewer nodes. We will consider a single instance of a GeeqChain using Proof of Honesty on networks with between 10 and 100 nodes in the sections below.

The three major resources needed by blockchain validation networks are bandwidth, storage, and computation.

We use the following notation to estimate how much of each resource GeeqChains require and what this implies for the costs of these networks.

S      Size of a transaction in kBs

N      Number of nodes in the validation network

B      Block size in terms of user transactions each

T      Total number of user transactions in a given blockchain

tps    Transactions per second

2.1 Bandwidth

The key thing to notice about this is that the bottleneck is hub upload speed. A hub uses roughly N times more bandwidth uploading transactions to each node than it uses in download or in either upload or download when serving as an ordinary node. The maximum speed of the validation network in tps can therefore be determined by the quality of the hub’s upload broadband connection. The average upload speed for US residential broadband customers varies widely depending on region and carrier from around 5Mb/s to 140Mb/s.3 In 2017 upload rates in the US averaged 22.79Mb/s.4 . Recalling that we must divide this by eight and multiply by 1000 to get kB/s, we find that:

 (N-1)(S/N+S+S/N) + S + SN = (N-1)S + (N-1)2S/N + S + SN ≈ (N—1+ 2 +1+ N)S = 2S(N+1)

---

Dividing this total bandwidth by N gives the average bandwidth used by a node/hub per transaction. Multiplying by 31.5M seconds per year gives the annual bandwidth consumed by the entire networks at various tps rates.

Table 2. Bandwidth requirements assuming S = 0.5kB

2.2 Storage

Each user transaction generates an additional fee transaction that puts payments for the validators into a system account. In addition, each time a block is written, a fee transaction out of the system account to each node is created. Finally, each block uses additional data for block headers, Active Node List (ANL) transactions, and sometimes, audit transactions. The first is a fixed amount per block and the last two are variable. To estimate the total storage needed, we consider these per transaction and per block costs separately.

The validity of each user transaction is determined by each node independently and generates both a user and fee transaction to be written the next block. This means 2SkB is written into the block and stored on N nodes forever (at least in principle).

Block headers include hashes of the Current Ledger States (CLSs), signatures, and various metadata. Let’s estimate this requires 10SkB. Audit transaction, ANL transactions, and some other transactions are probabilistic and variable. Let’s estimate these at 10SkB per block. Finally, each node writes a fee payment to itself and to all the other nodes out of the system account for each block (independent of the number of transactions in the block). Thus, NSkB is required to write one fee payment transaction for each node in the network for each non-empty block. In total, (20+N)SkB is the fixed storage requirement of each block regardless of the number of transactions it contains. Note, however, that this data is created locally, and so is not transmitted on the network. Thus, suppose a blockchain contained a total of T transactions and each block contained B user transactions on average. Note that if blocks are written every ten seconds, then B = 10×tps which implies that a chain with T transactions has T/B= T/10×tps total blocks. Given this, the storage requirement a chain containing T transactions is:

2TS+(20+N)TS/B = Total size of blockchain in kB
and so,
2S + (20+N)S/10*tps + Average kB per transaction

Table 3: Storage requirements per transactions with S = .5kB and 10 second blocks

To find the annual storage requirements over the entire network we multiply the number of transactions per year, the average storage required for a transaction, and the number of nodes in the network. Thus, a 100 node network running at 2tps requires a total of 63M × 4kB × 100 = 25.3TB.

Table 4: Total storage requirements with S = .5kB and 10 second blocks

2.3 Compute

Computational costs should be very small, but are difficult to estimate. For each block created, a node must do the following:

All in all, this is a fairly trivial amount of computational effort. Each transaction requires a search against the ledger, a signature and balance check, the creation of one or two fee transactions, and the updating balances in two or three accounts on the ledger. Joint validity is easy to check, and while audits might take non-trivial computational effort to complete, they should be very rare. Finally, some additional compute cycles are used in ordinary message creation and network communications. Besides possible audits, this should be no more than a background process that could run on home computers and even mobile devices.

From a resource standpoint, the compute required by GeeqChains are nominal. However, there may be instances of GeeqChain that run complicated applications or smart contracts. One of the purposes of Geeq is to provide trustless virtual machine services to users. Compute could become a non-trivial requirement on such chains. It may even be that nodes will have to employ more powerful computers to join such networks or risk being removed from the ANL for being non-responsive, out of sync, or incorrect in their execution of smart contracts or applications. This does not, however, affect the underlying resource requirements of the validation layer, which remain very small.

3. Cost Estimates

The calculations above estimated the physical resource requirements of a Geeq network. In this section, we translate these into costs.

Connectivity costs vary widely. Cloud providers offer bandwidth at prices between $.02 and $.08 per GB. A price of $80 per month for either 1TB or unlimited data is a typical broadband price for US households. This could be construed as an average cost of $.08 (or less) per GB. If a node is does not exceed its maximum allocation (including services provided to Geeq), then the opportunity cost is actually zero per GB. For the calculations below we will take $.05 per GB as the price of broadband.

Storage costs also vary widely. HDDs cost around $.03 per GB and might use $.005 in electricity per year. Assuming a five year lifespan, this a cost of $.05 per GB for five years of storage. Storage cost on cloud services vary widely and often include connectivity and compute as part of a package. Modest amounts of cloud storage can be had for free in many cases. Larger amounts of enterprise level cloud storage can be had for prices ranging up to $.05 to $.50 per GB per year. Obviously, these costs will fall in the future.5 We assume cloud storage costs $.20 per GB per year, or $1 per GB for five years.

Compute could be provided locally at a marginal cost of zero. Alternatively, we can consider it as using up a fraction of a laptop or desktop with a lifespan of five years. If running Geeq used 25% of the cycles of a device costing $1000, this would come out to $50 per year. Hosting an instance of a GeeqChain node on Ipage or Hostgator would probably cost on the order of $30 to $100. We will take compute costs as $100 per year.

Table 5: Total cost of bandwidth per year

Table 5 calculates the total bandwidth cost of running an instance of GeeqChain for an entire year with various network sizes and tps rates. Bandwidth costs turn out to be a relatively insignificant component of total costs. For example, a single node on a 100 node network running at 10tps would pay at most $16 per year for the required bandwidth. Note that 10tps is about the speed of the entire Ethereum and Bitcoin networks combined.

Table 6: Total cost of storage per year

Table 6 calculates the total storage cost of running an instance of GeeqChain for an entire year with various network sizes and tps rates (and assuming all transactions are stored for five years). Storage costs turn out to be the most significant component of total costs. Note that for large network sizes with high tps rates, each user transaction requires storing approximately 2SkB of data. For example, if each user transaction is .5kB, then approximately 1kB needs to be stored on each node of the network for each user transaction. This has several important implications:

GeeqChain is an approach to distributed ledger technology, which in turn, is a special case of a distributed data system. As such, each node keeps a full copy of all the data. In other words, one of the services that GeeqChain provides is redundant, distributed, data backup. By its nature, this is resource intensive, and cost is directly proportional to the size of the network (the number of nodes).

The cost of distributed data storage can vary widely in quality and cost. As an example, if data only needs to be stored on each node’s local hard drive for a year, costs might be as low as $.01 per GB (or even zero if a node has surplus capacity). If AWS or a similar cloud service is used, cost might be twenty times as much per year or more.

3.1 Different use cases are likely to call for very different sorts for storage and availability.

For example, a telemetry chain in which data from IoT devices (or hashes of data) is kept does not have a meaningful ledger state in many cases. The transactions in the chain are what are important, not some summary of these in the ledger. On the other hand, most of these transactions will never be looked at. Only in the case that the device owner needs to prove something about what the device sensed or did will the transaction become useful. For a micropayments chain, in contrast, the ledger is the only thing that matters. The blocks in the chain must support the ledger state, but what matters are the balances in the accounts. Other applications may fall somewhere in the middle.

Both the cost and the sheer volume of the data that GeeqChains might accumulate suggest that some additional architectural decisions should be made. A network running at 500tps accumulates 16TB of data year. Each node would need to be paid $16k just to break even. Clearly 16TB is more than one would want to keep on a local HDD. It also creates a significant barrier to entry to new nodes. Downloading 16TB alone would cost $800 at $.05 per GB.

3.2 Strategies might include:

1. Limiting the tps on instances: At 10tps, approximately 300GB of data per node per year is accumulated. While this is a lot, it is a manageable amount for a home computer. It would require using no more than 20% of a node’s residential broadband capacity. Downloading a year’s worth of blocks to become a node would cost $15, so the barrier to entry would not be terribly high. Each node would only need to be paid $410 per year to break even, so joining GeeqChain as a node becomes a smaller decision.
2. Creating light nodes as well as full nodes: Having 100 nodes in a validation network where nodes can come and go as they please, voluntarily and anonymously, provides increased confidence in the security of the chain. Keeping 100 copies of the entire blockchain, however, may not be necessary or worth the cost.
3. Using checkpoints: When the ledger state and not the data in the chain itself is the thing of value, maintaining the full chain may not be necessary. As long as the check-pointing system allows users to verify the honesty of the ledger, the data in the chain can be truncated and discarded periodically.
4. Giving instances of GeeqChain a finite lifetime: An instance of GeeqChain might be limited to 20tps, 25 nodes and also have a limit built into the genesis block that allows the application layer to run only for one year, and the entire chain for one additional month. This would mean that each node would have approximately 630GB in storage by the time the chain reached the end of its lifespan. Nodes would keep the data for an additional month to allow anyone who was interested to download and store it, and to allow the users and nodes to move the GeeqCoins they kept on the validation layer to another instance of GeeqChain.

3.3 The Advantages of GeeqChain : Federated Public Blockchains

Running Geeq’s validation layer code is computationally light. The opportunity costs may, in fact, be zero for nodes. The estimate below imposes a “lumpiness” to these costs that may not be present in real implementations. However, the effect of this assumption is to bias per transactions costs upwards for networks with smaller tps.

Table 7: Total cost of Compute per year

Table 7 estimates the total compute costs of running an instance of GeeqChain for an entire year with various network sizes and tps rates. Note, however, that compute costs scale linearly with the number of nodes on the network.

Table 8: Total cost of the network per year

Table 8 adds up Tables 5, 6, and 7, to find the total annual cost of various network configurations.

Table 9: Average cost of one transaction with 10 second blocks

Table 9 summarizes the cost per transaction on various types of GeeqChains.

4. Conclusions : GeeqChain Low Costs Open Markets for IoT and Micropayments on Blockchains

Transactions cost between six one-hundredths of a cent and one one-thousandths of a cent each, depending on the network. GeeqChain’s architecture makes it practical to consider using blockchain in applications such as recording IoT telemetry and micropayments where the value of each transaction is small, but the number of transactions is large.

Costs are more or less linear in the number of nodes used on the network.

The major portion of the cost is storage. If a cheaper solution is found than AWS at $1 per GB, costs could be reduced by an order of magnitude or more.

Networks with smaller tps are less efficient, but all networks approach a cost of one tenthousandths of a cent per transaction per node on the network.

Table 10: Total service cost per year

Table 10 gives a sense of what various levels of service would cost on GeeqChain. This table is designed with IoT telemetry primarily in mind. For example, a fire or burglar alarm that recorded its state of readiness once per day could do so at a cost ranging between .4 cents and 20 cents per
year. Devices that only report to the chain when an event occurs would pay costs proportionally depending of the frequency of the events. Hourly reports cost between 50 cents and 28 dollars per year. This frequency might be useful for industrial machinery controls that report volume or the
numbers of things used or produced. Minutely or secondly reports cost between 5 and 17k dollars per year. Infrastructure devices reporting electricity flow through a substation, water through a main, the state of a communications network, and medical device telemetry might need this level of frequency.

As we conclude this estimate of costs, recall the advantages of Geeq’s architecture.

First, the calculations presented here are for a single instance of GeeqChain. A single instance of GeeqChain, running at a modest 20tps, processes more transactions than Bitcoin and Ethereum combined.

Second, Geeq’s architecture permits unlimited scalability : as volume of transactions demanded increases, new instances of GeeqChains may be added, without competition for validation resources.

Finally, the architectural advantage of Geeq’s completely secure ecosystem for federated blockchains include interoperability between blockchains. Thus, we envision thousands of instances of processing transactions at once and sharing data and tokens as needed.