rbuysse/splinter-dev repository overview

⁠Splinter

Splinter is a privacy-focused platform for distributed applications that provides a blockchain-inspired networking environment for communication and transactions between organizations. Splinter lets you combine blockchain-related technologies -- such as smart contracts and consensus engines -- to build a wide variety of architectural patterns.

⊹ Features⁠ ⊹ Building Splinter⁠ ⊹ Demos⁠ ⊹ License⁠ ⊹

⁠Features and Concepts

Splinter allows the same network to do two-party private communication, multi-party private communication, and network-wide multi-party shared state, all managed with consensus. A Splinter network enables multi-party or two-party private conversations between nodes using circuits and services.

• A node is the foundational runtime that allows an organization to participate in the network.

• A circuit is a virtual network within the broader Splinter network that safely and securely enforces privacy scope boundaries.

• A service is an endpoint within a circuit that sends and receives private messages.

A Splinter application provides a set of distributed services that can communicate with each other across a Splinter circuit.

Splinter is designed for privacy

The key concepts of Splinter are fundamentally anchored to privacy.

• Circuits define scope and visibility domains.
• Shared state, a database updated by smart contracts, is visible only to the services within a circuit.

Splinter is distributed and flexible

Splinter works across a network

• State agreement is achieved via the Merkle-radix tree in Hyperledger Transact⁠, allowing multiple services to prove they have the same data down to the last bit, cryptographically.
• Consensus is provided for creating real distributed applications. Splinter currently includes two-phase commit for 2- or 3-party conversations.
• Connections are dynamically constructed between nodes as circuits are created.

Splinter is agile with smart contracts

• Smart contracts capture business logic for processing transactions.
• Runtime deployment of smart contracts means no need to upgrade the Splinter software stack to add business logic.
• Sandboxed WebAssembly smart contracts keep the network safe and ensure determinism.
• Scabbard, an out-of-the-box Splinter service that runs Sawtooth Sabre⁠ smart contracts across nodes, coordinated with consensus.

Splinter is designed for applications

• State delta export allows an application to materialize the Merkle-radix tree database to another database such as PostgreSQL. Applications can read from the materialized database (just like any other web application).
• Admin services provide applications with a REST API to dynamically create new circuits, based on business need.
• Authorization for circuit management can be delegated to application code and defined by business policies.

⁠Building Splinter

To build Splinter, run cargo build from the root directory. This command builds all of the Splinter components, including libsplinter (the main library), splinterd (the splinter daemon), the CLI, the client, and all examples in the examples directory.

To build individual components, run cargo build in the component directories. For example, to build only the Private XO demo, navigate to examples/private_xo, then run cargo build.

⁠Demos

Splinter includes several example applications that you can run as demos. The README in each directory explains how to run the demo.

• Private Counter⁠: Three services communicate over a circuit to increment a shared counter.

• Private XO⁠: Two services talk over a circuit to play a private game of tic tac toe (XO).

• Gameroom⁠: Web application that allows you to set up a dynamic multi-party circuit (called a "gameroom") and play tic tac toe (XO).

⁠License

Splinter software is licensed under the Apache License Version 2.0⁠ software license.

⁠Code of Conduct

Splinter operates under the Cargill Code of Conduct⁠.