Orchestrating multisignature transactions for other protocols within the Accumulate wallet  

Users can create arbitrarily complex authorization schemes in Accumulate due to its hierarchical key architecture. Authorization is also dynamic due to Accumulate’s unique key management capabilities, which give users the ability to upgrade or downgrade their security as needed, and add or remove people from multisignature transactions. This flexibility in key management can also be applied to multisignature transactions initiated by other protocols, such as Bitcoin’s Taproot. Imagine a will, for example, which directs the owner’s funds to be distributed to their family and friends in the event of their death. While the owner is alive, they don’t want to have to use multisig to move their funds around because it’s too much of a hassle to collect everyone’s signature. In Accumulate, we could create a high priority key page with single signature, for example, which would allow the owner to freely move their funds without the involvement of another party. The owner could also add or remove people to the multisig transaction before that transaction is finally packaged and sent to Bitcoin through a token gateway. 

Compressing big data with Scratch Accounts 

IoT networks, cryptocurrency exchanges, and automated data oracles can produce datasets that are too large or too complex to put on the blockchain. While Accumulate’s hierarchical identity architecture allows data to be conveniently organized on the blockchain similarly to how data is organized into folders and sub-folders on a computer, validating and storing each piece of data as a single transaction can be prohibitively expensive for any blockchain. With Scratch Accounts, transaction hashes are pruned at regular intervals of 2 weeks, but the root hashes are saved on-chain. This allows any user with access to the transaction hashes to cryptographically prove the data in a Scratch Account by deriving its root. Since roots are indexed on Accumulate, a user can also obtain proof of the order of that data and create a time-stamped audit trail.  

Scratch Accounts enable storage of IoT data on the blockchain by allowing users to automatically prune baseline data but write important events (e.g., temperature fluctuations) to the main blockchain. IoT devices can also be given their own ‘identities’ on the Accumulate blockchain, which allows each IoT device to independently write data to the main blockchain at a different frequency, or prune data under different conditions. Major cryptocurrency exchanges, which generate billions of transactions each year, would find it inconvenient or expensive to store transaction data on the blockchain. With Scratch Accounts, exchanges could store transaction data off-chain and cheaply derive root hashes from pruned data. Scratch Accounts also incentivize miners of oracle data. Miners can scrape pricing information from public pricing feeds, mine the pricing data, and submit records on Scratch Accounts for rewards at a fraction of the cost of writing data to the Main Chain. The winning data is put on the Main Chain while the losing data is pruned. 

Trusting single-source data with Accumulate anchors 

Inveniam is a partner and investor in Accumulate that credentials private market data from asset managers. This data will be onboarded to Accumulate where it will be validated through the protocol’s own network of nodes and regularly anchored to major blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. Anchoring creates a tamper-evident historical ledger with the security of a larger blockchain at a fraction of the cost of a typical transaction. This technology was pioneered by Factom, the predecessor of Accumulate, and is implemented on Accumulate at the protocol level. Accumulate’s anchors will be used by Inveniam and their partner Chainlink to validate single-source data that is commonplace among private market assets but particularly vulnerable to attack. For example, the rent rolls for a major property manager could be altered by a Man-in-the-Middle attack and erroneously accepted from a data oracle. Accumulate’s anchors on a host blockchain (i.e Ethereum) will allow smart contracts to cryptographically verify the data proofs against their native chains by tracing them back to Accumulate. The account owner that manages a particular asset will be sent along with the anchor, allowing an oracle to query Accumulate for account data to verify that a transaction or change to an asset was made.