From Blockchain to Web: Paving the Last Mile for Releasing Chained Data from the Blocks

Blockchain systems make use of the Internet infrastructure to connect thousands of nodes in peer-to-peer (P2P) networks. These connected nodes form complex ecosystems encompassing various technologies that collaborate to offer millions of users distributed, decentralized, secure, and read-only data stores. With the proliferation of various private and public platforms and applications that are built on top of blockchain technology, rich sources of several types of simple or complex datasets have been created. Consequently, new requirements for managing these rich data sources, integrating them with their hosting environment, and making them discoverable have emerged. Fulfilling these requirements calls for extending the architecture of current blockchain systems by adding different layers that offer dedicated services for handling the data and allowing for integrating the blockchain-based platforms and applications with other systems, including Web-based applications. In this paper, we present a novel approach aiming at extending the architecture of current blockchain systems by adding new service layers for processing the data and offering new services to provide a bridge between blockchain systems and Web-based external applications enabling them to query, retrieve, and access the datasets managed by robust permission-based access control.