iov stands for the Internet of Value and it acknowledges our founders’ initial vision of building a next generation of internet, where everyone can trade everything with anyone without trust-building intermediaries. The 42 in our name is a nod to Douglas Adams’ “answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything.”

Previous proofs are linked to the current proof, creating a mesh which ensures the data cannot be tampered with once it has been committed to the ledger.

A traditional blockchain measures the size of its blocks by the number of transactions within each block. They tend to take this approach for performance reasons. As we take a different approach, we are able to have a block size of one.

For each identity and asset type combination we create a chain of transaction proofs. For each transaction, the chains of all the identities and assets involved are combined to form a mesh of proofs.