Working to put intellectual property on the blockchain (IP over IP) since August 2013, it became clear that scalability was a fundamental barrier to wider adoption of blockchain.
In conversations with the community, the emphasis seemed to be on "scaling up" blockchains. We came to realize that a distributed database perspective brought a lot to the table, not only for scalability but also for other key database functionality: a flexible query language, efficient querying, and a permissioning system. Our approach was to "blockchain-ify" a scalable distributed database. By December 2015, we had a solution, which we piloted with lead customers.
