In the latest episode of our Blockchain Hustlers series, we feature Paul Chiari and his MetaStreme platform. MetaStreme is a robust and scalable Bitcoin transaction engine designed to be simple yet capable of supporting the most demanding applications. Virtually any application can easily harness the power of Bitcoin through MetaStreme’s API without the need for complex development.

Chiari demonstrates MetaStreme’s suite of tools, and the idea behind the platform, and gives a hands-on demonstration of what it can do.

WeatherSV and building on blockchain through experimentation

Chiari explained that MetaStreme was built over time through experimentation and developments in the Blockchain space.

‘We’ve developed quite a degree of interest based on certain use cases we found applicable to industries in our region. The first of those was a thing called WeatherSV, a concept which became quite popular and led us to scale our application and our ways of putting data on-chain.

Chiari said that the unshackling of Bitcoin in 2018 was a significant step which gave his team the confidence to build on ideas on how a public ledger can enhance the value and veracity of data. This led to the development of WeatherSV, which demonstrates the ability to index and retrieve climate data immutably stored on a distributed ledger.

‘It taught us a lot of lessons during that period, and since then we’ve sort of wrapped it all up into a product called MetaStreme which allows any other business to integrate into our service to be able to utilise blockchain within their application.’

Addressing a need in the market with a blockchain-based service

Chiari noted that blockchain development can be quite complex, as it requires a specialised skill set beyond what app developers are currently used to. ‘So the API gives a very simple interface to blockchain technology. Plus, we have other integration tools, including IoT, which makes it very easy to bring those tools and applications on-chain.’

Chiari also cautioned that the blockchain market had been negatively impacted by bad actors in the crypto-asset market, reputational issues and the volatility of the markets. These and other issues tend to put businesses off of blockchain integration entirely, said Chiari.

‘They don’t necessarily see the potential of the underlying technology through all the noise that goes on around the crypto space. So MetaStreme essentially allows any business or application to interface with the chain without having any involvement in crypto.

‘They don’t need to worry about addresses, keys, UTXOs, etc. They don’t even have to pay in crypto (as) we can facilitate a range of payment options and then take care of the crypto component to then allow that business to get to the core of the technology.’

MetaProof to implement SPV according to the Bitcoin white paper

Chiari explained that MetaProof is MetaStreme’s implementation of Simplified Payment Verification (SPV). SPV is described in section 8 of the Bitcoin white paper and allows a transaction recipient to prove that the sender has control of the source funds of the payment they are offering without downloading the full Blockchain. It does this by utilising the properties of Merkle proofs.

This does not guarantee that the funds have not been previously spent, this assurance is received by submitting the transaction to the Bitcoin miners. However, in such a case the SPV proof acts as strong evidence of fraud backed by legally recognised digital signature technology.

SPV thus allows users to securely transact with each other, peer-to-peer, while nodes act to form the settlement layer.

‘It’s a way of being able to verify transactions without running a full node. As a blockchain scales, the requirements to run a full node get higher. The cost, the computational time, and all these sorts of things make them quite unviable,’ Chiari said.

‘But your typical application, they do not need to be verifying every transaction on the chain and the complete contents of that transaction. So SPV takes the pertinent information from the blockchain without synchronising all the data on the blockchain, but still has the information available to be queried that will allow you to prove both the veracity and the existence of a transaction on the blockchain.

‘And moving forward, we believe that any sort of scalable applications really should be built with this foundation, as in a LiteClient- type node, as opposed to what’s been done in the past with the full node.’

Demonstration of MetaStreme

This episode of Blockchain Hustlers also includes a demonstration by Chiari on how MetaStreme works, including:

• An overview of MetaStreme, MetaProof, and Simple Payment Verification (SPV) services;

• An example of individual and bulk proofs;

• A walkthrough of the client portal, which enables developers to take control of their Bitcoin projects allowing them to manage network settings, API keys, wallets, requests and accounting on a per-project basis;

• Zero UTXO and address management, advanced transaction support, IOT device support and other features.