Icarus Artifact Network

Artifacts

Artifacts are the distributed data objects stored in the Icarus Artifact Network; formally A. All Artifacts stored in the IAN are referenced in the Icarus ledger by their Merkle hash. Artifacts can be sharded and encrypted for the security of private data. Artifacts come in two types: structured and BLOBs (Binary Large Objects). A structured Artifact has several entries with defined properties, similar to rows in a SQL database. A BLOB Artifact could be a document, .csv file, VR asset, software program, a side chain, or any other arbitrary data with a defined format. While both Artifact types benefit from the decentralized algorithms that govern the IAN, structured Artifacts also benefit from the additional analytical capabilities of the Icarus Guru.

The governance of each Artifact is defined by its Uploader in its associated smart contract. Therefore an Artifact can be defined as a property of an Account States stored memory, or formally: To the world state (σ ), this initialization smart contract is the Artifact’s creation step. The smart contract is executed in the IVM (Icarus Virtual Machine) to determine permissions around the reading , updating , deleting , distributing , storing , and analysis of that Artifact. Because the ledger cannot govern what users do with the IAN data, the distribution of Artifacts is governed by algorithms outside of the IVM.