ConsenSys develops Regis for distributed registry

Registries exist everywhere. We need them for cars, houses, company assets, books, marriages, births, past music, movies, domain names, and even your computer needs a registry to keep track of the software you install. We need them so that we have a common place to search or keep records. Some of the most important registries, such as those that register public property, are controlled by governments because they have the power to guarantee the authenticity of the records.

One of the characteristics of public registries is that they are public. This means that anyone can register who they are at home and what property they own, and registries are supposed to be for the public. If you want to register real property, you just need to know where the registry is and request a written report from the local registry, right? No, at least in Brazil, it's not that simple yet.

Brazil's real estate registries are profit-driven private entities that are licensed by the central government. Today, there are some problems. If there is more than one real estate registry in a city, how do you know which registry the apartment you are interested in is registered in? You have no way of knowing without asking the owner. You need to go to each registry in person, wait in line and spend time to find out if that registry has what you want. Sao Paulo, the largest city in Brazil, has 18 real estate registries, but their records are not unified.

Andres Jung, a ConenSys employee from Chile, told me a similar story about horse registries. According to him, "When a horse (or any other "valuable" animal) is registered, it has a pedigree record, which is a sign of racehorse quality. Statistics show that the offspring of a very good racehorse are more likely to win races than the offspring of a racehorse with a poor racing record. If you buy a racehorse that is considered to be very good by others, you will need a way to check its pedigree and background. The problem is that horse registries are everywhere. They are private, expensive (you pay to register and read the records), and ineffective. It is also easy to scam people: if you have an ordinary horse and you want to make it more valuable, you can just ask or pay a horse registry to prove that the horse is of good pedigree. Horse registries also have records of horse ownership. Therefore, the issues of registry ownership mentioned above also apply here.

On the one hand, having multiple registries for the same object is undesirable (as we saw with Brazilian real estate registries and Chilean horses), and on the other hand, it gives too much power to the registry owner. Can this dilemma be solved? In fact, we can use Ethereum’s blockchain to have a distributed registry.

There are many advantages to using blockchain for registration services. First, the records are immutable: once a record is made, no one can delete it. They are public, searchable and consultable by anyone, so the records can maintain integrity and traceability. Second, it is completely digital, and no documents or signature checks are required. The relevant records of the transfer of ownership can be sent by email, which is simple and convenient. Because the infrastructure is decentralized and there is no central control, it is subject to failure. Third, it is safe. Blockchain technology uses encryption algorithms to ensure a high degree of security for all operations. Due to these advantages, it is expected that different types of blockchain applications in basic registration will emerge in the next few years. In fact, some countries have begun to take this option seriously.

If we can predict that many blockchain applications for registries have urgency and benefits, why not build a tool to facilitate it? At ConsenSys, we did just that. We created Regis.

Regis is a platform that enables the construction, deployment and management of decentralized registries on the Ethereum blockchain. It allows users to design and maintain user-defined key-value pairs without expensive infrastructure requirements. And the blockchain has stability and no data failures due to central points.

Users use a very simple web interface and do not need to know how to use smart contracts to build and deploy their registry. Regis can create smart contracts in real time as registration data is generated. Users can choose from a wide range of parameters (registration fees, early user benefits, etc.) and can add additional behaviors to the registry being created (such as auction keys).

auction

One of the key features of Regis is that it makes it easier to auction off buildings. The ability to auction is a desirable feature in existing registries. A well-known example is that auction addresses are largely based on the Domain Name System. As you already know, DNS converts domain names into IP addresses. When you type Google.com into your browser, DNS looks up and returns the IP address of the domain name, which tells you how to use the server on the Internet. But DNS currently has a problem with illegal squatting because it uses a very simple registration method. You can easily buy an unused domain name for $10 and use it forever. Because of this simple registration mechanism, large companies have emerged with their sole purpose of acquiring cheap domain names and reselling them for hundreds of times the profit.

This is not a fair system. But with Regis we can take a domain name system and add auctions to it. For example, you can designate a domain name for auction, set the time to accept bids for 6 months or a year, and at the end of the auction, send out the domain name to the highest bidder. This is a much fairer system because it allows everyone to participate in domain name allocation.

Another type of auction is the secret bid auction led by Regis. In this auction, the bid price of the participants is not revealed until the auction ends. It is a complex system, and your bid cannot be lower than the bid of any other participant, otherwise you will not be able to continue to participate in the auction.

This type of auction ensures fairness for the registry. And Regis allows users, organizations, and governments to attach three different types of auctions to the registry they are building. Regis also allows users to build democratic registries, where the fees come from the users and are borne collectively by them. This feature can encourage a particular registry organization.

Upgrade Contract

Contracts in the blockchain are permanent and cannot be modified, but when the old contract has defects, an updated version of the contract will need to be used. A simple way to improve the decentralized registry application is to use a registry instead of hard-coded contract addresses. For example, if there is a proxy contract at address Oxabc, the proxy contract can be placed in the registry. The distributed registry application can then find the address of the proxy contract in the registry instead of using the original Oxabc address. If an error is found in the proxy contract, the distributed registry application can deploy and update the address of the proxy contract. Since the distributed registry application is always looking for a registry that stores an updated version of the proxy contract address, it does not need to change anything itself.

Case Studies

The first company to adopt Regis for decentralized building registration is BVRio (http://bvrio.org). They have a digital marketplace for timber trading in Brazil, they have their own stock market, real-time quotes, and price charts. They have a scoring system associated with ownership based on the origin, transportation, and legality of the timber, and they want to allow anyone in this market to provide this information because it has a direct impact on the price of the timber.

By decentralizing the timber industry and scoring it in Regis, producers now have increased marketing capabilities. They can make adjustments in production or transportation to see how this affects their score. Given the stability of the blockchain, the information is immutable and can be made public. BVRio also does not need to maintain a hardware facility to keep records or worry about server failures because blockchain never has a single point of failure.

Try Regis

Regis is currently running on Ethereum mainnet at http://regis.nu. You are welcome to use it and provide feedback so that we can improve the user experience.

Original article: https://medium.com/@ConsenSys/regis-the-decentralized-registry-5fb89655219a#.gaq4pqn3q
By Alex Batlin
Translator: Wang Er
BTC address: 16enj2bapYdzPfa2DWSVaT1g95MCXg2hHt
Editor: Kyle
Source (translation): Babbitt Information (http://www.8btc.com/‎regis-the-decentralized-registry)