Psibase
For a simpler overview of Psibase and its capabilities, see the landing page. This document will explore the purpose and capabilities of Psibase in technical detail.
Table of Contents
What is Psibase
At ƒractally, we believe that the web needs higher integrity infrastructure to facilitate the next generation of truly neutral human collaboration and governance. Psibase is open source softare that can be used to deploy such infrastructure to be used for publishing full-stack Web3 applications. It allows for private, public, centralized, or decentralized deployments, and aims to improve data integrity, user privacy and security, application efficiency and composability, and user and developer experience wherever it is deployed.
Web3 applications
Applications published on Psibase are interconnected in a way that those on a traditional web stack are not. Psibase accounts allow users to use a single account to interact with all Psibase applications. Psibase applications are able to read from and write to a shared database, as well as send and receive synchronous messages to each other both server-side and client-side. This infrastructure allows users to seamlessly (often invisibly) digitally sign their interactions with applications, so applications can be confident about with which users they are interacting.
User experience
The entire Psibase technology stack is built with user experience as our foremost concern. At ƒractally, we believe that the majority of users will ultimately use the most enjoyable and functional solutions, regardless of security, privacy, and other concerns. Therefore, to reintroduce integrity into the web, we must meet or exceed the expectations of users familiar with traditional web application experiences, while also being rigorously committed to the ideals we believe are ultimately best for online human interaction and collaboration.
Default user-facing applications
Psibase deployments come with default full-stack applications that manage account creation, user onboarding, application browsing, and other core capabilities required by all deployments. This saves time and energy for developers who, even if they are deploying their own infrastructure, can immediately focus on their intended application, rather than the core user-management capabilities.
Trusted front-ends
Application front-ends may be built using traditional front-end tooling, but are stored on the same blockchain as the back-end services and their data. This architure has very powerful implications, not yet realized in the wider distributed application space; if a user runs her own infrastructure, then she has cryptographic certainty not only of the back-end services and the blockchain state, but also of the validity of the application front-ends she uses to interact with those services. This, combined with our novel inter-applet-communication architecture allows completely secure user-interaction with distributed applications without intrusive pop-ups from authenticators ("wallets") whenever a front-end is interacting with it's own back-end service. Put another way, Psibase application front-ends are an extension of their back-end service, so just as a service has implicit authority to write to its own database tables, so too does the front-end have the implicit authority to silently sign for users when they interact with its own service/state. This allows for unprecedented user immersion for web3 applications deployed on Psibase.
Innovation stack
Psibase includes many technologies and innovations. Here are a few of them.
Blockchain
Psibase uses a proprietary blockchain rewritten from the ground-up from many of the same veterans who originally developed the Bitshares, Hive, and Antelope blockchain architectures. This blockchain is an important component of the overall Psibase architecture that positively affects data integrity, user security, and application composability. Many of the other components of the Psibase software are built to abstract the concept of a blockchain to give both users and developers an experience that is familiar and comparable to those in a more traditional architecture. Information on scalability and other economic design tradeoffs inherent to this blockchain design is outside the scope of this particular document, but can be found elsewhere in our documentation and publications.
Triedent
Blockchains coordinate shared state between different computers, or nodes. But on a single node, there is still an underlying database technology used to store, cache, and retrieve data. Most blockchains today use the same pre-existing state-of-the-art database technologies used for all other applications, such as LMDB or RocksDB. The ƒractally team has determined that it is possible to significantly improve the throughput of that underlying database by redesigning one with the specific constraints and specifics of the blockchain use-case in mind. The outcome of that research and development is now known as the Triedent database.
Even still in its Beta version, the Triedent database performance was benchmarked against several other database technologies and was found to be superior for use in a blockchain context in many ways. Triedent enables read queries to run in parallel without significantly slowing down write performance. This significantly reduces the costs of providing API access the blockchain state because the same memory can be used by dozens of CPU cores at the same time.
Fracpack
Another innovation of the Psibase ecosystem is to use a novel data-serialization format known as Fracpack. Designing a binary format from the ground up lets us prioritize the properties that are important for our use-case. Fracpack gives us extremely fast data packing and unpacking, and even allows users to read data without unpacking (almost zero-copy). It's a format designed for efficiency in Psibase service-to-service communication, node-to-node communication, blockchain-to-outside communication, and database storage. We believe the efficiency and usability gains from our custom binary format make the deviation from standard serialization formats (Protocol Buffers, etc.) worthwhile.
To better understand the Fracpack format, see the Fracpack section in these docs.
WebAssembly
Psibase makes heavy use of WebAssembly, both for core system capabilities and also for the execution of services (application back-ends). This allows Psibase services to be written in either C++ or Rust, with the potential to expand in the future to support any language that compiles to the Wasm binary format. Using WebAssembly allows Psibase applications to run extremely fast in a sandboxed execution context, ensuring memory safety across the system. Psibase also attempts to maximize its use of WebAssembly modules stored in blockchain state to run core chain capabilities, to minimize the complexity and collaboration required to upgrade them.
Furthermore, the WebAssembly executes in a custom virtual machine known as EOS VM. This virtual machine is already a battle-tested WebAssembly VM with several years of operation in high performance production environments, and was custom-built to meet the performance demands of blockchain applications, which are significantly higher than those of normal web browser applications. On top of the already impressive innovation of the EOS VM, Psibase modifies it to enable the use of SIMD ("Single Instruction, Multiple Data") instructions, for greater levels of parallelism and performance.
To learn how to write your own web-services in C++ or Rust and deploy them to a local Psibase deployment, see the services section of these docs.
Composability
Our infrastructure also allows services running in one wasm execution context to synchronously communicate with those executed in a separate context. This allows for extremely powerful and composable application designs.
Smart signatures
Smart signatures are one of the novel contributions the Psibase architecture makes to the wider blockchain space. These allow developers to add new or custom signature types and curves. Smart signatures can be used for Inter-blockchain-communication proofs, merkle proofs, and other cryptographic algorithms that may be necessary for future innovation.
Since smart signatures are implemented entirely in WebAssembly modules synchronized by the blockchain, this ensures they can be upgraded or patched in real time without the difficult coordination challenges experienced by other platforms (contentious or non-contentious hard forks).
Smart signatures verification is also done in parallel to increase speed and the proofs are pruned to limit the data growth rate and decrease costs for infrastructure providers.
Smart authorities
"Smart authorities" refers to the now completely dynamic and programmable Psibase account permissions. This means that accounts could use private keys, time delays, multi-party signature schemes, or anything else future developers dream up for authenticating account actions. And of course, the authorization logic is done completely within wasm modules, enabling simple and real-time updates to authorization capabilities.
GraphQL
Psibase infrastructure providers are also web servers that respond to various user read/write requests. For reading service state, infrastructure providers are also GraphQL servers that know how to respond to requests for paginated data from service tables. Application and service developers have complete programmatic control over responding to web requests to their applications, with custom libraries made available that make it simple to define GraphQL schemas, endpoints, and construct responses.
Deployment types
Those who deploy Psibase to infrastructure may choose one of multiple strategies to pay for the infrastructure.
Simple deployments
Simple deployments allow one node or multiple failover nodes to coordinate on a single server. In a simple deployment, the owner of the server must pay for the server costs through traditional means. Users of applications in a simple deployment may be unaware of the Psibase backend, and will feel as though they are using traditional web applications with a special Psibase OAuth account system.
Distributed deployments
Distributed deployments have two variations, centralized and decentralized deployments.
Centralized deployments
Distributed centralized deployments allow multiple independent parties to collaborate on providing infrastructure. These entities can each run a copy of the infrastructure, and Psibase will coordinate their synchronization. Distributed centralized deployments provide cryptographic proof to each of the infrastructure providers that the data in the database is correct and untampered with. If the infrastructure providers each have public and independent reputations, then deployments of this nature could be sufficient to allow users to trust the integrity of the data, as modifying the shared data requires the collaboration of a majority of the infrastructure providers.
Decentralized deployments
Distributed decentralized deployments allow a permissionless set of independent parties to collaborate on providing infrastructure. To accomodate deployments of this nature, it is necessary that Psibase provides the capability to run ongoing infrastructure provider elections to define the active set of infrastructure providers who must synchronize and verify the data.
Decentralized deployments give users the maximum confidence in the validity of the data, as the users may use various election strategies to have input over the set of infrastructure providers.
Rather than use a permissionless and unbounded set of active infrastructure providers, as is done in many other distributed web application deployment infrastructure systems such as the Ethereum blockchain, Psibase uses a permissionless and unbounded set of infrastructure provider candidates and runs a continuous election in order to achieve a limited final set of active infrastructure providers. This is done to maximize throughput while preserving the system integrity.
Some core capabilities may be missing from Psibase to accomodate this deployment type at this time. Simple and centralized deployments are our current priority.
Conclusion
Psibase is more than a blockchain platform. Psibase is the brand that encapsulates a whole host of open-source technical innovations including a new blockchain architecture, libraries for database management and data-serialization, and a full-stack web3 application and microservices framework. It is the output of the research and development arm of ƒractally concerned with producing best-in-class base-layer infrastructure that can be trusted to reliably power the next generation of humanity's online collaboration and governance tools.
All of this technology is open source and available for use for free under the MIT license, and we are always looking for ways to make the process of use and deployment faster and simpler. If our technology is of interest to you or your organization, please try it out, and don't hesitate to reach out in our public telegram channel.