The Todalarity is Here, Part Two: The Rapidly Expanding TODA SovTech Ecosystem

- Toufi Saliba, Dann Toliver, Ben Goertzel

Foreword:

In Part One of this 3-part blog post series, we outlined the general nature of the conceptual and technical relationship between SingularityNET and TODA, and the way these two technologies can work together to provide the infrastructure for an emergent Global Brain.

Now here in Part Two we elaborate more deeply on the nature of TODA, explaining some of the why and how it is capable to serve as the core secure decentralized messaging protocol of the Internet of Value and the Global Brain.

SovTech, Sovereignty Technology, refers to the tech that enables every person and organization to observe and control what happens with their own digital assets — their data, their identity, their devices, their money and tokens and other stores of value. SovTech is needed to ensure decentralized governance in digital networks of any kind, be they networks of humans or AIs or other software or hardware devices or combinations thereof.

TODA comprises the most efficient and scalable available core technology for SovTech — which is why it fits so naturally with SingularityNET, given the core role that data, compute power, identity and financial sovereignty play in maintaining the decentralized nature of the SingularityNET network.

The technical core of the current TODA SovTech ecosystem is the TODA protocol, which uses cryptographically founded data structures and decentralized network logic to enable platforms and apps to create and transfer the ownership of assets without any dependency on third parties.

TODA/IP is the most recent version of the TODA protocol and was created to push TODA down further into the network and hardware stack than was the case with earlier TODA protocol versions. TODA/IP can be thought of as a basic communication protocol analogous to TCP-IP or UDP. Of course, it is more complicated than these things because of the necessary subtleties of providing decentralized validation. But it shares with these that it is, at the bottom, simply a scheme that nodes in a network can use to wrap up and efficiently convey certain types of digital stuff to each other.

The “trick” underlying TODA/IP’s operation is the usage of algorithms that get more efficient the more nodes are in the network, and the more geographically distributed these nodes are. This would not have been so effective in the early days of Bitcoin, when there were only a few nodes in the network, sporadically online. But this is 2019.

From a math point of view, one can view TODA as a basic protocol for transmitting unique objects, using decentralized mechanisms to validate uniqueness. Units of monetary value or one type of unique object that requires frequent transmission in the modern human world. Units of reputation or identity would be other examples.

If you want a database of transactions corresponding to a TODA system — be it a centralized, replicated or distributed database — you can build it. However, no such database is built into the design.

If you want a specific cryptographic token for economic value exchange to run on top of a TODA system, it can be straightforwardly implemented. The TDN token created by TODAQ is an example — which has been in private use within the TODA ecosystem for some time and is planned for a public launch this fall. There is also an Ethereum-on-TODA project, which is creating a version of the Ethereum token that uses the TODA protocol at its core.

The TODA Primer provides a high-level overview of the TODA protocol and what it aims to do, and roughly how it does it. There is not yet a public whitepaper that thoroughly summarizes the protocol and its operation, but this situation will be remedied before the end of Q4 2019. A series of academic papers as well as an in-depth whitepaper are in late stages of preparation.

TODA has been developed over the last 3.5 years in what might be described as a semi-stealth mode — funded via private investments (rather than, say, an ICO or crowdfunding) and operating according to a plan of releasing thorough documentation and open source code concurrently with scalable and robust working software implementations. These releases are going to be rolling out at a rapid pace as Fall 2019 unfolds.

Scalable and Inexpensive Proof-of-Work Based Validation

To plunge into technicalities just briefly, for sake of the geeks in the audience: TODA/IP shares with other “cryptographic world computing” platforms the concept that each device partaking in the network contributes to the computation of the network, according to mathematically driven decentralized coordination. Like most blockchain-based networks today, TODA/IP relies on a certain type of Proof-of-Work, i.e. to validate itself as a participant in the network, a computing device has to do some amount of a certain type of computational work.

However, in the TODA/IP design, the work is a form of DDC (Deterministic Distributed Computing) that can not be overpowered by devices with additional computation, instead of relying on a pseudorandom function that selects devices in the network for participation in a computation based on their geographic dynamic disbursement. Devices cannot apply more computation than the modest amount required for the pseudorandom selection of work that is assigned to them in each block of time — an amount of work that cannot be known in advance, but the moment it is known becomes deterministic.

Because there is no way to achieve extra privileges in the network via extra work, there is no intrinsic need for “mining farms” or similar mechanisms as one sees in common decentralized software frameworks today. Also, while this approach enables economical incentives for devices to be on the network, it requires no disincentive for not participating in the computation.

As a basic formal protocol, TODA can be implemented in various different programming languages and embedded in different systems. Currently Toda.Network is involved in joint ventures involving additional implementations addressing particular purposes. TODAQ offers TaaS (‘TODA-as-a-service’), an open API platform powered by TODA, providing ownership management and settlement of all digital assets.

TODA-Based Platforms

Being a highly generic protocol for secure ownership management, TODA may be used at the foundation of a variety of different software and hardware platforms — bringing practical SovTech functionality across levels of the tech stack and across vertical markets.

Platforms built on TODA might be, for example, financial services, AI engines, smart contracts, blockchains, cybersecurity, decentralized applications and anything else of value that needs to be managed and transacted efficiently.

Note that it’s the dependency layer of a platform, mediating the interactions between components, that benefits from decentralization, and that’s what TODA enables. Building the dependency layer for such a platform on TODA provides a high level of decentralization and security by design. We refer to 5 main benefits platforms derive from running on TODA: Security & Efficiency & Confidentiality & Scalability & Interoperability. SovTech is SECSI!

The service layer running on top of the dependency layer — which is generally what the user sees — may be centralized or decentralized to varying extents, depending on application needs.

The TODA Ecosystem

Development of TODA and TODA-based systems is driven by a network of organizations operating independently but coordinated-ly:

• TODA Research Institute, or TRIE, is a non-profit foundation responsible for stewarding the development of the TODA Protocol as an open source technology.
• Toda.Network participates in joint ventures building on TODA directly or through the Toda.Network platform
• There are also products being built on the TODA protocol directly, bypassing the Toda.Network platform. Ethereum-on-Toda is an example. Products built on TODA directly belong to whoever is building them. They can all benefit from P2P interoperability without having any dependency on third parties.
• TODAQ is a group of companies involved with commercializing the TODA Protocol. TODAQ has a fundamental mission to restore ownership and control of identity, assets and data for all as a human right; it serves businesses and governments and offers the TaaS (‘TODA-as-a-service’) API platform.

Tokens on TODA

As an ownership management protocol, TODA has no specific token or other value instruments intrinsically associated with it. Various TODA implementations and deployments may be associated with different value instruments, or with no particular value instrument.

The Ethereum-on-TODA project, for example, leverages TODA in the context of the Ethereum platform and token. An implementation of SingularityNET-on-TODA would be associated with the SingularityNET AGI token, and a multi-chain version of SingularityNET could allow interoperation of Ethereum-based AGI tokens and TODA-based AGI tokens.

There is one current initiative to create a token uniquely and foundationally based on the TODA protocol: this is TDN, a digital loyalty reward designed to offer global, long-term, stable economic utility in the context of multiple types of value transactions between people and businesses. The TDN (TODA Digital Note) token can be used for value transfer without cost or fees and has a cryptographically fixed primary supply of 2³⁷ TDN (approximately 137.5 billion TDN).

Owning TDN is not necessary to harness the TODA protocol, which does not require an intrinsic ‘gas’ or settlement token. However, TDN is a token designed from the ground up explicitly to harness the best of the TODA protocol.

The nonprofit STAR Foundation (STAR = Strategic TODA Note Asset Reserve) is responsible for TDN generation, distribution & management of a mixed basket reserve backstop of commodities, land, fiat currencies and intangible assets.

The TDN token will be launched on public exchanges in early Q4 2019, which will introduce a number of new growth dynamics to the TODA ecosystem.