Chaine Lightning Talk at EthereumDevNL

On the 26th of October there was an Ethereum Dev NL Meetup in Amsterdam. I (Kit) attended and did a lightning talk about Chaîne. The text follows below. For slides I showed four web pages: the SDG Insights home and View Ideas page, and the chaine.io home and white paper page, then back to home for the structure explanation.

I'm involved in a new project that is aimed at the Paris Climate Agreement. We want to implement a blockchain that tracks the compliance of the 193 countries that signed the accord. Our approach has two components. On a global level the blockchain organizes the reporting of data and on a local country level it assists with collecting data. The project is just beginning; we're in a genesis phase. Importantly, we have an entrance into the United Nations. The UN is doing an IT Challenge and we're participating. This is the Challenge site. Here is our project. It's called Chaîne (the French word for chain) and we've made it to the second stage which is called Teaming and Collaboration. So we're looking for collaborators. For the next step in the Challenge we need to implement a working proof of concept. For that we're using default Ethereum as the blockchain and IPFS, the Inter Planetary File System. We have a project site, chaine.io, and on the site is an Idea Description document. The url says white paper but we're not that far yet. What we're envisioning is an infrastructure that is tree-like, where there's a main chain and 193 child chains. The main chain has reporting facilities at its head and at the tips of the child chains are data collection applications. Each country has control of its child chain and these periodically weave with the main chain. This is not linear, and we're not sure if a linear blockchain is what we need. In many ways our approach is suited to a DAG, a Directed Acyclic Graph, which is being used by Iota, Byteball, and the up and coming Universa. Another one with potential is RChain which is not public yet but gaining momentum. So we're not sure Ethereum is the most suitable blockchain but we'll be evaluating it during the proof of concept. With this structure in mind we chose water lilies as a visual metaphor for the infrastructure. Imagine a body of water with 193 lily pads, all growing from the same root. The flowers are the collection applications. As time goes by the water rises and the blockchains grow. If the Paris Climate Accord succeeds then eventually the water level will stabilize into a healthy ecology. For the planet. If you're interested please have a look. The site is chaine.io, everything is interlinked, and we also have a Telegram group which is chaine_io. If you're curious or might want to contribute, you'd be most welcome. Thanks.