UPDATED 13:41 EDT / MARCH 10 2017

EMERGING TECH

Blockstack’s decentralized app platform comes to Amazon Web Services

New York-based Blockstack Inc. Thursday announced the release of its blockchain app infrastructure on the Amazon Web Services Marketplace and its fastsync technology that brings nodes, or self-contained virtual servers that secure transactions, to life faster than ever before.

This will allow developers using Amazon.com Inc.’s cloud service to rapidly spin up nodes that use Blockstack’s infrastructure to build out decentralized applications that securely self-manage user identity, authentication and data without the need for servers or databases. Developers can deploy their own nodes on AWS directly from the Blockstack Core listing in the marketplace with ease.

This implementation with AWS follows the addition of Blockstack Core in the competing Microsoft Azure marketplace in December.

According to Amazon, this is the third blockchain-based service now available on AWS. Others are the Eris Platform, a smart contract and distributed application framework from Eris Industries Ltd. and the Manifold Platform, a secure high-performance framework for financial applications using blockchains from Manifold Technology.

The addition of these blockchain services follows a partnership between Amazon and the Digital Currency Group, one of the biggest blockchain company investment firms. Under DCG’s guidance, numerous blockchain outfits have been experimenting with AWS as a back-end for blockchain-related technologies.

Blockstack raised $4 million in new funding during January led by Union Square Ventures, with participation by DCG and others.

Blockstack fastsync brings nodes to life faster

Along with the new AWS implementation, Blockstack announced the availability of its fastsync service that allows Blockstack nodes to initialize within minutes rather than days.

Booting up a new Blockstack node requires that node to process the blockchain it is connected to. As a blockchain is a cryptographically secured shared global ledger of transactions, large blockchains—such as the Bitcoin blockchain—can be extremely large and take a long time to process initially.

Fastsync uses peer-to-peer technology for a new node to rapidly fetch an up-to-date model of the blockchain from nodes that have already been signed and verified by the service. This means that each new node does not need to do its own heavy lifting and can rely on nodes that already have a known-good state of the blockchain.

More details on fastsync are available in the Blockstack 0.14.1 version notes on GitHub.

Image: Blockstack

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