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Offloading Data Processing

IOTA is unique in that it provides data-only transactions in the Tangle. However, use-cases that build on this feature face two major problems:

  • The Tangle is permissionless, therefore anyone can send data blocks with any content and the blocks are not authenticated with signatures like value transactions. The source of the data published through the Tangle is not identifiable by the core protocol.
  • Data use-case applications often rely on structured, filtered and processed application-specific data. Such functionality puts unnecessary load on network nodes running the core protocol.

Stardust removes any data processing from the core protocol, as supporting use-case specific processing requirements in the core protocol is unfeasible – and anyway, it would jeopardize node performance and hence transaction throughput in the network.

You can add additional data to outputs that can be used by dApps built on the Tangle. The protocol will treat this metadata as pure binary data, it has no effect on the validity of an output, but it will increase the required storage deposit.

Tagged Data Payloads​

Data in Stardust is published via Tagged Data Payloads, which are treated as binary data by the protocol. It is recommended that processing and exposure of application-specific data published through these payloads is implemented by second layer protocols. One major benefit of this approach is its flexibility: each application can define and implement their own requirements, for example to authenticate data payloads based on digital signatures, indexing by custom fields or validating payloads against expected data structures.

The re-engineered node software provides a Remote Procedure Call (gRPC) interface, called IOTA Node Extension (INX) to external applications to interact with nodes for example to listen to all network activity. Data use-cases are encouraged to build their custom data processing applications and connect them to the Tangle via INX.

To stay consistent with this new architecture, Stardust also removes the ledger indexing from the core protocol and implements a ledger indexer application via an INX module.

Impermanence

Since the tag serves as a marker for second layer dApps, it is not actually considered by the Stardust protocol. This means that it could be removed completely.