Introducing Freighter — And the bigger picture with TNO
Hi everyone and welcome to the first milestone Medium post for the EDF supported project by the SKALY team members Peter Willemsen and Dennis Schouten.
In this post, we will elaborate on the birth of Freighter and how it became the project it is today.
We started developing SKALY with a clear vision in our mind, creating global awareness on a healthy lifestyle. As believers in a decentralized world where everyone owns their data, we took a decentralized approach to transfer data from a device to a dashboard.
As time passed by, more and more needs began to arise regarding scalability and reliability of data that we move around and store, as well as ease of use.
This journey took place in 2018-2019 and, at the summer of 2019, we knew that our infrastructure had more potential than being just an internal tool.
After reaching out and spreading the word on various social media channels about our progress as a company we were approached by the research institute TNO within the Netherlands telling us how much they liked our thinking in building a decentralized platform for health data.
From there, the accidental birth of Freighter happened, and it began to sprout as the weeks passed.
Various meetings with the research institute later we were asked to join them for a new project. When we learned the details of the project (which will be disclosed within a short time frame due to other parties involved) we knew straight away that some key elements of SKALY were a 100% match of the institute’s goals.
As SKALY is built on top of IOTA, we were the primary advocates for IOTA with our talks at TNO and immediately recognized the golden opportunity for IOTA.
The vision of the research institute was to deliver an open-source platform that could be used to transport data from and to different points on a decentralized platform. We will disclose more information later on.
We decided to share our thoughts with the IOTA Foundation and explore if we could turn this project into an open-source project for the whole community to benefit from. The result is that we support the open-source project and also receive funding from the EDF.
This brings us to the first milestone for this open source project, you all know it by now; Freighter!
Freighter is part of the larger project powered by the research institute, where we as active partner are developing a complete platform to exchange and process medical data without disclosing any of the data without any consent.
Supported by the EDF, we began decoupling Freighter from the SKALY platform and began rebuilding and testing this as the first milestone of the overall open source project, making Freighter our first delivery to the wonderful community.
So therefore, without further ado, we bring you the first release of Freighter! The new distributed messaging service brings a solid way for developers and users to interact with large amounts of data, send through secure channels!
Using huge, parallel data-streams that can come from multiple IOTA nodes, it is possible to run nearly any application that requires display or handling of so called “big data” to be used within IOTA. But we don’t just make that claim: our Freighter-based dashboard is nothing but a static page using IOTA nodes alone.
Everything is built on top of IOTA, and aside from a IOTA node nothing else is needed to get started.
If you wish to see it working right away, without going too much into the technical side of things, please see our demo, which can run in the browser or on your phone, right here:
If you’re a developer, interested to read more about the technology behind Freighter, or wish to contribute, you can check out the Freighter project on our GitHub, that contains a very detailed README about everything we did.
Want to get involved, be up to date with the latest developments, and be in touch with the team? Join our SKALY Open Source Discord server!
