The Curation, Interfacing and Analysis Lifecycle of Blockchain Application Data

This paper discusses the lifecycle of data for next generation Web3 decentralized applications, describing how data can be specified, curated, and analyzed. The focus of this work is to study the different types of approaches for indexing blockchain data in a way that application data and relationships can be designed, retained and exposed. Blockchain transactions conform to smart contracts definitions, which can have inherent structures through standards such as NFTs, but can also be designed in a custom way for bespoke use cases. Existing Web3 approaches either focus on service-based approaches that build custom pipelines that extract data in a specific way, or by creating indexes after data has been written without prior influence on how that data should be consumed. SIMBA Chain is a platform that simplifies the management of a Web3 application’s lifecycle and takes an alternative approach by enabling design-time specification of transaction interrelationships. SIMBA enables smart contracts to annotate data relationships between smart contract methods to effectively enable schemas to be defined a priori within the source code. By using these relationships, it then autogenerates a GraphQL schema for convenient consumption. We discuss the pros and cons of such an approach and present three application use cases in coffee tracking, NFT car titles and a supply chain scenario, where the approach was extended to also connect and search data across multiple blockchains.