Bootstrapping Trust in Distributed Systems with Blockchains

Blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum have seen significant adoption in the past few years. Beyond their cryptocurrency uses, blockchains are being used to build new, decentralized versions of DNS and public-key infrastructure (PKI) that have no central points of trust. Such blockchain-based naming and PKI services can be used as a general-purpose “trust layer” for Internet applications. We present the design of a new blockchain-based naming and storage system called Blockstack. Blockstack powers a production system for 60,000 users and is released as open source software.