Built on SxT: Instruxi

Instruxi teams up with Space and Time to hyperscale data availability.

Built on SxT is a customer-authored blog series that showcases the many use cases across Web3 that are being built on top of Space and Time. This blog post was authored by the team at Instruxi to highlight how Space and Time is a critical part of their stack. Read the post on the Instruxi blog here.

Instruxi teams up with Space and Time to hyperscale data availability

Instruxi (IX) is excited to announce its partnership and integration with Space and Time (SxT), a cutting-edge data warehouse that secures low-level data management tasks while maintaining the performance standards demanded by the industry's most critical workloads.

Instruxi is a company dedicated to creating a secure and transparent data sharing platform that prioritizes user consent and privacy. Instruxi empowers users to control who has access to their data and how it is used.

Called "Intent and Consent," Instruxi's approach provides users with greater transparency and control over their data, which can help build trust and confidence in the data sharing process. By enforcing consent at a granular level, Instruxi ensures that users are aware of how their data is being used and can withdraw consent if they are not comfortable with the intended use.

Another benefit of Instruxi's approach is that it enables organizations to share data more easily and efficiently without compromising on security or privacy. By providing a secure and transparent data sharing platform, Instruxi helps reduce the risk of data breaches and other security threats while also ensuring that data is only shared with authorized users who have the proper permissions.

Instruxi facilitates this through a novel protocol called Proof-of-Policy. Proof-of-Policy is a protocol developed by Instruxi that aims to enable universal data sharing for Web2 services while ensuring that data consumption is done with the proper intent and consent of the data owner. The protocol works by defining policies that govern the usage of data and creating a smart contract-based system to enforce these policies.

Instruxi is integrating Space and Time on two fronts

Firstly, Instruxi's SxT connector is bundled with its data mesh platform, Neutrino Mesh, for all users. With this connector, mesh developers can build complex data products that blend SxT's verifiable data with most external data sources, ranging from ERP systems, to traditional SQL databases, to high-throughput streaming sources. This means that mesh developers have a way to query multiple data sources, including SxT, using the same SQL query. It also means users can extract and transform data from any of the 30 native Neutrino Mesh connectors and load that data directly into SxT from any of those supported systems. Neutrino Mesh is designed to abstract away the complexities of connecting to multiple data sources, configuring public-private key authorization in SxT, and ultimately allow data owners to focus on curating highly available data catalogs using the Proof-of-Policy.

To obtain authorization, a user initiates a challenge and submits a signed response with their public key. The public key must correspond to an owner of the relevant policy in order to receive a JWT token. This token contains the necessary metadata for generating a query scope on Instruxi’s Space and Time connector. See Trino for more details.

Secondly, Instruxi is excited to announce its first implementation of virtual NFTs (vNFT) due to go live in Spring 2023. vNFT, a term coined by Instruxi, is a new type of dynamic NFT only achievable due to the cryptographically verified data served by SxT. The major issue with Dynamic Non-Fungible Tokens (dNFTs) today is that they are rigid in nature. Metadata for these NFTs is hot-swapped behind the scenes using an oracle or a transaction initiated by an off-chain entity because metadata is typically held at a URI on some immutable hosting service like IPFS. vNFTs are a type of non-fungible token whose metadata is stored in an off-chain data warehouse. vNFTs are dynamic and can change over time as the underlying data in the data warehouse changes. This means that a single vNFT can represent a complex and constantly evolving dataset, making it a powerful tool for data-driven applications and services. 

Here is an example of Instruxi’s proposed vNFT metadata spec:

NFT smart contracts typically do not hold data directly but rather use metadata URIs to reference off-chain data.  See OpenSea’s metadata standard for more information or check out the full vNFT example metadata spec here.

One of the key benefits of vNFTs is that they can help to improve the transparency and accountability of data sharing. By using vNFTs to represent datasets, users can have more confidence in the accuracy and provenance of the data that they are working with, since the vNFT serves as a cryptographic proof of the data's origin and integrity.

Thanks to SxT and Proof of SQL, vNFTs are able to add the level of scale required to tokenize larger volumes of data without compromising on the cryptographic guarantees that traditional decentralization techniques offer. SxT enables this by using the industry standard in blockchain oracles to verify incoming queries, ensuring tamperproof result sets to downstream applications.

More about Proof-of-Policy

Proof-of-Policy is the foundation for enforcing intent and consent. Policies define the conditions under which data can be accessed, used, and shared. These policies can be customized to suit the specific needs of different data owners and can cover a wide range of scenarios, such as defining who has access to the data, how the data can be used, and how long it can be stored.

The policies derived from Neutrino Mesh smart contracts provide a tamperproof record of all data transactions, ensuring that data usage is transparent and auditable. The system also ensures that all data transactions comply with the policies defined by the data owner. This helps to prevent unauthorized access or misuse of data, as well as ensuring that data is used for the intended purpose.

Compared to other data sharing protocols, such as those that rely on centralized intermediaries or complex access control mechanisms, Proof-of-Policy is designed to be more transparent, secure, and efficient. By enabling users to control who has access to their data and how it is used, Proof-of-Policy can help to reduce the risk of data breaches and other security threats, while also facilitating more efficient data sharing and collaboration.

For Instruxi, SxT is not just another powerful data warehouse, but more importantly, it's a way for Instruxi to build trust with its users. Instruxi's ethos is grounded in the idea of ethical data management, distribution, and commercialization. Instruxi's partnership with Space and Time represents a significant step forward for secure, universal data sharing. By leveraging the SxT data warehouse, Instruxi is able to provide unparalleled insights and data-driven solutions to its clients, facilitating their analytics and AI projects and the building of apps and dApps. The future of data sharing looks bright, and Instruxi is excited to be working with SxT at the forefront of this emerging market.