Decentralisation?

Some questions which might come to mind immediately when evaluating the Proven Network are: is it decentralised? Is it permissionless? Is it censorship-resistant?

The answer to all of these questions is no. These are explicit non-goals of this project. Proven is designed to be a perfect companion network to Radix DLT, which already has those bases covered for the important work of being a source-of-truth, along each of those dimensions, for assets and the contracts than govern interactions between it's users.

Rather, the Proven Network should be seen as an alternative for dApp builders to self-hosting their off-ledger backend systems, or to using platforms like Cloudflare, Vercel, AWS Lambda, GCP Cloud Functions, etc. to host them.

The goal of the Proven Network is to provide a comparable quality of service, performance, and developer experience - as any of the other serverless platforms - while additionally ensuring these systems run inside a cryptographically secure trust-model. A model which proves the off-ledger computation is as verifiable and auditable as the on-ledger computation. As well as additionally providing specialised infrastructure and tooling to help Radix developers bring products to market faster.

What does this mean for application builders?

Generally - it means the platform can only provide the same level of guarantees around censorship as any of the other serverless alternatives mentioned above.

Future research will investigate a federated architecture where application developers can self-host their own Proven nodes, scoped to their specific application, which can act either as a primary or a failover. However this work will only begin once the core network is stable.