What is Icarus Network?

The Icarus Network provides the benefits of trustlessness and decentralization to application- level data creation, user-level data ownership, and business-level data analytics. The system as a whole is architected as two distributed networks that operate in unison, and individual Icarus nodes are made up of three main components: the Icarus Ledger, the Icarus Artifact Network (IAN), and the Icarus Virtual Machine (IVM).

To keep all nodes in the network in agreement on what information is stored in the Icarus Ledger, the Icarus Network implements the new Delegated Asynchronous Proof-of-Stake (DAPoS) consensus algorithm. DAPoS is a Byzantine fault tolerant delegated transaction gossip protocol that scales to the capacity of the hardware validating the transactions. Rate- limiting is implemented as an alternative to gas to create a system with zero transaction fees for Stakeholders .

While all nodes maintain a full copy of the Icarus Ledger, every node can keep a different subset of the Icarus Artifact Network (IAN). The IAN is comprised of a distributed network of Farmers , storing Artifacts, or Merkelized units of data. Using homomorphic encryption, data owners can opt-in to Icarus Guru which enables data researchers to trustlessly query fully encrypted, distributed data for valuable insights without requiring the data owner forsake their data sovereignty.

Finally, we introduce the Icarus Virtual Machine (IVM). To support the existing ecosys- tem of distributed applications (Dapps), the IVM supports nearly every opcode in the EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) and therefore most Solidity smart contracts. The IVM extends the functionality of distributed applications with the ability to create, update, distribute, and analyze Artifacts in the IAN.