Five Bells Notary

Server application that notarizes receipt of crypto-condition fulfillments by an expiry date

What does this do?

A standard Interledger payment relies on connectors to relay transfer data within a time limit. This works fine in most cases, but when participants can agree on some trusted parties we can do better.

In order to decide whether to commit or rollback a transfer, the participants to a transfer may choose to use a witness. Using a witness, we can guarantee atomicity for the transfer, as long as the witness promises only to publish the commit or the rollback message, but not both.

Of course, now the transactional semantics depend on safety and liveness of the witness. In order to minimize the risk of failure, we use not a single witness, but a consensus group of witnesses. (Consensus feature is not implemented yet.)

Usage

To run with sqlite,

NOTARY_DB_SYNC=1 NOTARY_DB_URI=sqlite://:memory: npm start

To run with postgres, create a database, then

NOTARY_DB_SYNC=1 NOTARY_UNIT_DB_URI=postgres://user:password@host:port/db_name npm start

To run with Oracle, first, install Oracle Instant Client, e.g, in /opt/oracle/instantclient. Then run an Oracle database in a docker container (example), and specify NOTARY_DB_URI:

NOTARY_DB_SYNC=1 NOTARY_DB_URI='oracle://user:password@docker-machine-ip:port/' DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/oracle/instantclient LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/oracle/instantclient npm start

NOTARY_DB_SYNC is a test setting that creates the database by running the SQL scripts in ./src/sql. These scripts are not re-runnable. You must drop the database or set NOTARY_DB_SYNC=0 after the initial run.

Configuring log level NOTARY_LOG_LEVEL (default: info) the allowed levels in order of verbosity are fatal, error, warn, info, debug, and trace