DISTRIBUTED FRACTIONALIZED DATA
NETWORKS FOR DATA INTEGRITY
Arun Majumdar
Virgil Systems
Toronto, Ontario
arun@virgilsystems.com
Abstract—The world is being transformed by the onset of
new high speed 5G Technologies that open the possibility of
IoT networks at scale. This demands delivery guarantees and
coordinated distributed communications that are resistant to
damage and can self-heal under adversity. The speed of change
is increasing with increased automation, artificial intelligence,
information from multiple sources, integrated systems of sys-
tems and emerging quantum technologies. Current distributed
consensus checking mechanisms are computationally intensive
and fail to scale along with these changes because of the
complexity of proof of work calculations or the unnecessary need
to bind in domain specific elements such as cryptocurrencies.
Furthermore, these mechanisms are brittle in that small changes
in messages can cause restarts or failure of integrity checks, or
they introduce domain specific elements (e.g. monetary design
that has little to do with integrity). We propose distributed
ledgers as a pure technology coupled with a strong proof protocol
for exchanges, called “Proof of Integrity” without any need for
cryptocurrencies or other domain specific elements. Proof of
Integrity provides distributed data guarantees and operational
continuity through adversity or breakdowns while creating a
reliable and trustworthy layer for the application specificity of
domain specific elements.
I. I NTRODUCTION
We demonstrate a new system for distributed data integrity
guarantees and resilience to damage and tolerance to adversity.
Virgil Systems is focused on edge-compute and edge-storage
concepts by integration of 100% data integrity with fully dis-
tributed data availability. Virgil’s 100% data integrity solution
has three key features: Transmit and receive data with a Proof-
Of-Integrity (POI); Antifragile Scalability to physical storage
capacity; and Identity based data binding.
Proof of Integrity leverages distributed ledgers and erasure
code designs to ensure edge endpoints can prove data was not
degraded, faked or that losses occurred. Antifragility means
that the system can self-heal and gets more resistant to damage
if attacked: our system uses a new holographic data concept
and distribution mechanism on the network so that content
immutability (i.e. resistance to censure or attack), availability
and scalability are handled by machine-learning processes as
smart-contracts. Identity based data binding means data is
bound to its provenance, such as a person’s identity, and moves
with that identity while privacy preservation and traceability
are conserved.
Most modern IoT networks require migrating storage and
computation to the cloud and to and from devices at the
Govind Mohan
Virgil Systems
Toronto, Ontario
gmohan@virgilsystems.com
edge. Edge processing implies offloading of operational stor-
age and computations to the devices themselves [1]. Today’s
centralized software systems bottleneck services to the billions
of connected devices and maintenance of cloud server farms
become points of failure for the network.
While blockchain and distributed ledger systems naturally
lend themselves to enabling distributed edge processing, IoT
devices have limited computing power and need to minimize
energy consumption. Conventional distributed ledger systems
as in blockchains like Ethereum and Bitcoin suffer from the
overhead of full replication of data across all devices in the
network for maintaining integrity through consensus: this is
infeasible given the resource constraints of computation, stor-
age and power [2]. Recent innovations in ledger technology,
such as LazyLedger [3] have improved performance in this
area by using special codes to reduce the problem of block
verification to data availability verification, allowing a node to
verify a block by downloading just a portion of it. Virgil’s
Proof of Integrity takes this concept further, by distribut-
ing data across the network as erasure codes and creating
anonymity (resistance to censure) by distributed data mixing.
This results in guaranteed immutability being preserved while
also enabling full data integrity using novel erasure codes and
maximized availability by creating redundancies across the
network. Innovations in distributed messaging, such as Hedera
Hashgraph [4] have allowed for a novel availability solution
elaborated below. Thus, an IoT network is able to withstand
large network failures without losing any data.
II. P2P I OT DATA T RANSACTIONS
A. Conventional Blockchains
Blockchain systems such as Ethereum and Bitcoin require
peers to have full copies of the block for transactions to
occur. A block has two components: a header that, at the
very least, contains a hash of the previous block, and the
list of transactions included in the present block.This method
is computationally intensive: all peers need to verify the
block order as well as transaction validity. LazyLedger [3]
improves this scheme by requiring that only some peers
contain full transaction data while others operate solely using
block headers (light clients).

The transaction data of a block is converted into a 2kx2k
(k is the side length of the matrix arrangement of data,
doubled when Reed-Solomon is calculated) matrix of row-
and column-wise Reed-Solomon codes, and Merkle roots are
computed for all rows and columns. Another Merkle root
is computed from the latter roots, known as the data root.
This data root and all row and column roots are added to
the block header. The light client can thus sample a random
number of shares s; 0 < s < (k + 1)2 where each share is a
member of the matrix and proves transaction validity given
the availability of all s shares [5].
B. Virgil Systems Data Integrity Solution
The Virgil Systems Data Integrity Solution takes a similar
approach of erasure codes but differs in avoiding block
ordering and maintenance completely, instead favoring
Cryptographic Record Chaining (CRC) and network data
entanglement using binary operations to maintain network
data immutability.
A peer sending data divides the data into k shards,
each of which are converted to “holograms”, which are a
patented erasure code that can recover the original shard using
s; n/5 < s < n shares, where n is the total number of shares
the hologram contains. Each hologram can be reconverted
to a shard by a unique key, stored in a receipt file. Each of
the holograms is randomly distributed among peers, and the
randomized order is stored in the receipt file as well. Any
peer that requires the data receives the receipt file from the
sending peer, allowing it to reconstruct the data. Integrity
is thus preserved by the novel erasure code. Immutability
is preserved as the holograms received by the peers from
the sender are “superposed” with the existing data on that
peer (using an operation such as XOR). As a result, any
binary data uploaded to the network acts as a smart contract
that modifies the state of the binary data spread across the
network. Finally, availability is guaranteed as peers gossip the
data that they contain randomly with other peers. Network
data thus persists even if a substantial amount of the network
is destroyed.
III. N ETWORK DATA AVAILABILITY S OLUTION
A. Hashgraph Structure
The Hashgraph data structure was conceived as a means of
ensuring the fairness of transaction ordering in a distributed
ledger system. In Hashgraph based consensus, all information
a node knows is communicated to another randomly selected
node, known as gossip. A hashgraph is maintained by all
nodes, which contains an order of who gossiped to whom.
The hashgraph itself is gossiped along with transaction
information, in other words, there is gossip about gossip. In
this way, all nodes can keep track of the information known
by all other nodes. Further, accountability of transaction
ordering is possible by verifying exactly when a node was
made aware of transactions between other nodes.
B. Virgil Systems Availability
Network availability is ensured even when many nodes are
eradicated. As mentioned above, data shards are randomly
distributed to nodes across the network. These nodes contact
K nodes in the network every t units of time and entangle
all the data they contain with these nodes, using a binary
operation such as XOR. The period t and the number of
redundancy nodes K are network parameters. Nodes maintain
a hashgraph to record what order data is sent to nodes, and
this hashgraph is gossiped so there is overall tracking of state.
Using this, the network can ensure that data is appropriately
gossiped in order to survive catastrophic events. In case of
such an event, nodes can use the hashgraph to reconstruct
any lost data shards using the entangled holograms. Network
data thus persists even if a substantial amount of the network
is destroyed.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT
We are grateful and acknowledge the critical inputs provided
by the Creative Destruction Lab at the University of Toronto,
Dr. Joshua Gans and Dr. Barney Pell.

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