Onchain Data Containers

Existing Ethereum standards (ERC-1155, ERC-20, ERC-721) are rigid in terms of implementation, and existing approaches force developers to write applications that lack interoperability and compatibility, making it difficult to upgrade the functionality of existing smart contracts because usually data is stored alongside business logic. In this sense, the current approaches to developing applications on the Ethereum blockchain have fragmented the ecosystem, creating the following problems:

• Deployed smart contracts usually stick either to ERC-1155, ERC-721, or ERC-20 standards.
• Smart contracts cannot be easily upgraded.
• Data and business logic are usually stored in a single smart contract.
• Absence of a modular approach.

To develop a more complex decentralized ecosystem where components can be easily maintained, a new architecture has to take over the current development approaches.

Onchain Data Containers

Nexera presents a solution to these problems by introducing a new smart contract architecture called the On-Chain Data Containers (ODC) that separates the data storage from the business logic. Furthermore, the ODCs introduce the access-control layer between the data storage and the business logic that writes the data. This allows writing data to a smart contract safely, preventing unauthorized access to data.

This approach implies that a developer must deploy at least three smart contracts that define the ODC architecture:

• Data storage - Stores the on-chain data.
• Access-control layer - Controls what addresses can write data to the data storage.
• Business logic - Writes data to the data storage.

By implementing this architecture, developers can benefit from:

• Standardized interfaces that handle the data and business logic separately.
• Backward compatibility and gradual transition of existing projects to the new standard.
• Interoperability between different standards (e.g., ERC-20, ERC-721, ERC-1155). This means that the data storage only exposes interfaces that manage tokens, while the business logic that interacts with the data storage can be easily modified.
• An access-control layer that allows only trusted addresses to read/write data.