Original Works is a foundation incubated by Revelator, a leader in rights management and digital distribution for the music industry. Revelator provides solutions that streamline complex processes like artist royalties and licensing agreements. Original Works was established to pioneer a decentralized ecosystem for intellectual property (IP) management, enabling publishers, royalty admins, digital music distributors, artists, and other stakeholders to distribute royalties and share information securely and efficiently using blockchain technology.
The primary goal of this project was to create a system dedicated to better, more efficient music IP management. The current industry standard is the DDEX (Digital Data Exchange) registry. DDEX is widely adopted for exchanging metadata about music releases, including information about new tracks, licensing agreements, and distribution changes. By transitioning DDEX registration to the blockchain, Original Works aimed to provide a unified, tamper-proof, and automated system for sharing and validating critical information between industry stakeholders.
This initiative centered on implementing innovative technologies like EVM blockchains, Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs), and a decentralized network of validators to ensure the music royalty management's scalability, transparency, and security.
This project pushed the boundaries of what is possible at the intersection of blockchain technology and music metadata management. The team faced the unprecedented challenge of integrating the DDEX standard, an XML-based format that is inherently complex and outdated, into a decentralized ecosystem. Achieving this required a level of innovation rarely seen in the industry.
Parsing and validating XML files with extensive schemas like XSD, while ensuring compatibility with blockchain constraints, proved to be a monumental task. To maintain decentralization and transparency, traditional centralized solutions were not an option, and the team had to engineer a bespoke network of ZK-powered validators.
The incorporation of cutting-edge technologies, such as EIP-4844 BLOBs for data availability and the Risc0 virtual machine for generating Zero-Knowledge Proofs, added layers of complexity. These technologies, though groundbreaking, came with unique limitations that demanded creative problem-solving and rigorous optimization.
The ultimate challenge was balancing the computational demands of zk proofs with real-world scalability, ensuring that the system could process thousands of messages daily without compromising efficiency or accuracy. Despite these obstacles, the team devised solutions that set new standards for decentralized data validation and registration, showcasing the innovative spirit that drives progress in Web3 technology.
The challenges in a nutshell:
Validating Complex DDEX Schemas
DDEX messages use XML format and follow a strict schema (XSD) with over 50,000 lines of validation rules. Ensuring adherence to these rules while integrating them into a decentralized system posed significant technical difficulties.
Scalability and Gas Costs
Conducting XML validation directly on Ethereum smart contracts was impossible due to transaction gas limits. The team needed an alternative decentralized computation method.
Efficient Proof Generation
Generating ZKPs for XML validation was initially too slow, taking up to 16 hours per file. This was far from practical given the high volume of daily transactions.
Temporary Storage and Data Availability
Ethereum’s new EIP-4844 standard introduced BLOBs (Binary Large Objects), which allow for storing large data on-chain for only 18 days. The team needed a reliable way to make these BLOBs accessible to validators during this limited timeframe.
To address the challenges of building a decentralized and scalable registry for DDEX messages, we implemented a range of innovative solutions. At the core of our approach was the use of Risc0, a Zero-Knowledge Virtual Machine that allowed us to generate zk-proofs for the validation of XML files. By leveraging Risc0, we could write validation logic in Rust, enabling the use of existing libraries for XML parsing and validation while ensuring that the computational process remained verifiable and tamper-proof. To manage the large size of DDEX messages, we utilized Ethereum’s new EIP-4844 BLOBs, which provided a temporary but efficient way to store large datasets on-chain for up to 18 days, giving our validators enough time to extract and process the data. Additionally, since DDEX messages often contain images (like album covers), our CLI tool, first extracts these embedded files and uploads them to IPFS, replacing local file paths with corresponding CIDs. This ensures that all media assets are preserved in a decentralized manner before the message is packed into a BLOB and submitted on-chain.
Once validators retrieve a BLOB, they process it using Risc0, extracting key metadata while generating a zk-proof that verifies the correctness of the operation. Since BLOBs disappear after 18 days, we implemented an archival mechanism where validators upload both the raw BLOB and its extracted, human-readable JSON-formatted messages to IPFS. The CID of the archived BLOB is then recorded in the subgraph, ensuring long-term availability and auditability. This step is vital, as it allows anyone to independently verify the integrity of the zk-proof generation process, preserving transparency and trust in the system.
To optimize zk-proof generation, we preprocessed raw XML files into JSON, reducing computational complexity while maintaining data integrity. Further improvements, including GPU acceleration and hardware-specific optimizations, helped cut down proof generation time from 16 hours to just 3 minutes. The resulting proofs, along with extracted metadata, were then submitted to our smart contracts, where they were verified and emitted as on-chain events. Subgraph indexed these events, completing the decentralized pipeline for registering and validating intellectual property metadata. Through these steps, we successfully built an efficient, scalable, and fully decentralized system that brings DDEX metadata management onto the blockchain, addressing both technical and industry-specific challenges.
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