Jack Davies ventures into all things technical that form Metanet protocol

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Unveiled less than a year ago by Dr. Craig S. Wright, the Metanet is a global protocol and framework for facilitating and structuring on-chain internet for the Bitcoin SV (BSV) blockchain. Dr. Wright defined the Metanet as a value network which could enable a more equitable internet infrastructure.

In his new Metanet blog series, nChain researcher Jack Davies has been delving into what the Metanet is and how it will reshape the internet. In part one, he defined in detail what Metanet is, describing it as “an umbrella protocol that can help other, use-case specific protocols to be used together and interoperate with each other.” He also distinguished between the Metanet as a concept and the Metanet protocol.

This week, Davies delved even deeper in part two of his Metanet series.

The goal of the Metanet protocol is to provide a structure for the organization of internet-like data that is mined on the BSV blockchain. As the number of applications and users on the BSV blockchain grows, so has on-chain data.

Davies explained, “The Metanet protocol, then, is a tool that can allow the on-chain data used in these applications — and many more in the future — to be woven together. We thereby allow disparate on-chain data to be structured in ways that improve the functionality of the applications they are powering and help achieve the mission of allowing users to truly own their data on the Metanet.”

To better understand the Metanet, one needs to learn about directed acyclic graphs (DAGs). DAGs are structures which comprise nodes and edges, contain no cycles and where every edge between a pair of nodes is directed. DAGs are a staple of modern data structures and information systems including Bitcoin.

The blockchain is a DAG, as Satoshi described it in the whitepaper. Further, the blockchain contains several distinct DAG structures, the two most prominent being the Block DAG and the Transaction DAG.

As Davies explained, “The Metanet protocol is simply another set of rules, which are applied on top of the blockchain protocol, that allow us to define another DAG: the Metanet graph.”

In his next post, Davies promised to go even deeper into the details, and the advantageous properties, of the node & edge structure used to create the Metanet graph. The Metanet blog series is expected to raise awareness among BSV developers and enable them to be better positioned to create a global data sharing infrastructure powered by the superior BSV blockchain.