Public Chains

Public Chains: The public chains provide global and decentralised platforms for stakeholders to interact, transact, and participate in NetX’s ecosystem. They establish trust, consensus, and transparency among network participants.

The public chain's central role in NetX is enforcing decentralised peer-to-peer integrity verifications among its constituent nodes, creating a vast web-of-trust. Notably, these verification mechanisms extend beyond the public chain itself. As each NetX private or federated chain also maintains internal integrity verification protocols by having connecting nodes participate in decentralised peer-to-peer verification, the public chain's web-of-trust extends to encompass connected private chains and federated chains. Therefore, even private chains with relatively few nodes benefit from increased reliability and trustworthiness, as they are part of a more extensive network of nodes facilitated by the NetX public chain.

The second pivotal role of the NetX public chain is data integration. This is achieved through cross-chain bridges, effectively transforming public chains into central hubs that seamlessly connect all interconnected private and federated chains. This connectivity facilitates smooth data exchange and collaboration across the entire network. With these bridges in place, NetX public chains also use a routing network for private applications and data. They provide interfaces for applications to quickly locate their dependent peers, including other applications or Data Access Contracts. This functionality enables the establishment of connections and the consensus-building process regarding the correctness of returned values. Additionally, the public chain records interaction trails and automates payments for these interactions, enhancing the overall efficiency of data exchange and application interactions.

Finally, NetX's public chain extends its services to provide a public infrastructure where individuals and SMEs can deploy their data and applications. This public-facing infrastructure mirrors the capabilities offered by NetX's private chains, including support for privacy-preserving transactions, backward application compatibility, and local data integration. This inclusive approach empowers a broader range of users to leverage NetX's capabilities for their data and application needs, fostering innovation and accessibility within the network.

Specifically, two additional types of contracts are implemented:

• Routing Contracts: dynamic and collaborative components developed and managed by data network operators. They gather metadata from interconnected chains, construct a comprehensive network understanding, communicate with other Routing Contracts to enhance their knowledge, form the network's topology, facilitate efficient data discovery and routing, and continuously improve their performance based on feedback. These contracts are the backbone for connecting Service Providers with Data Owners within the Small Data Network, ensuring streamlined and secure data access and processing while fostering network growth and innovation.

• Service Contracts: the gateway for end users, whether individuals or enterprises, to access and process data within the Small Data Network. These contracts receive and process user requests, orchestrating the retrieval of necessary data from various data centres connected to the network by sending requests to data access contracts. Once the required data is collected, the End Service Contracts perform data processing operations and deliver the results to the end users. These contracts act as entry points for applications hosted on the Small Data Network, providing a user-friendly interface for data utilisation. Moreover, End Service Contracts can be stacked to form calling chains, creating more complex and sophisticated application services that leverage the network's interconnected data sources and capabilities.

Furthermore, it's important to note that multiple public chains may exist within the NetX ecosystem, each tailored to specific application scenarios or regulatory requirements. These diverse public chains provide flexibility and customisation options, ensuring that the Small Data Network can adapt to industry needs and compliance standards. This approach allows for a more versatile and adaptable ecosystem that can cater to a wide range of use cases while maintaining the core principles of decentralisation and security.