Massa Web

Rationale

The "code is law" rule is a cornerstone of DeFi. It states among other things that once successfully audited, a program can remain trusted. This implies that the program of a successfully audited smart contract may never be unexpectedly changed by an outsider (note that contracts that modify their own code during runtime cannot be trusted this way in the first place, but this is visible in the code audit). Popular ETH smart contracts essentially follow that rule.

However, most DeFi web3 apps such as https://app.uniswap.org/ are typically used through an otherwise normal website that talks to a browser plugin (typically Metamask) allowing the webpage to interact with the user's wallet and the blockchain. The website that serves as an entry point to the dapp is neither decentralized nor immutable-once-audited, thus breaking the very foundations of DeFi security. And that's how you get into situations like this one: https://www.theverge.com/2021/12/2/22814849/badgerdao-defi-120-million-hack-bitcoin-ethereum

The goal here is to allow addresses on Massa to store not only a balance, bytecode and a datastore, but also named files. Those files must remain small, or storing them will cost a lot to their owner. Any address, through bytecode execution, can initialize, read and write the "files" part just like it would with the datastore. The reason why we don't reuse the datastore for this, outside of the risk of key collisions, is for easier auditing: if the code never writes into its own bytecode nor its filestore after deployment, it is safe to assume that the stored website can't change anymore. That's it from the point of view of the node.

The Massa browser plugin will function like Metamask (wallet, interaction with the blockchain) but also provide extra functions:

• when an URL of the form xxxxxxxxxxxx.massa is typed in the address bar, the plugin will check if xxxxxxxxxxxx is an address
• if it's an address, the plugin will try to load the website.zip file from the filestore of that address, unzip it, and display its index.html (or whatever other page is requested).
• if it's not and address but something like a domain name, the plugin will interrogate a "Massa Name Service" smart contract through a readonly call to try to match the domain name to an address. This is inspired by how the Ethereum Name Service works. Then it will load the address's website as defined above.
• the website will typically contain html, css and javascript to remain lightweight. The javascript can dynamically talk to the Massa plugin to interact with the blockchain and wallet (just like Metamask)
• if the website needs heavy assets (videos, large images...) that cannot be stored on the blockchain, the plugin allows looking up optional external data on IPFS or on the normal web, but plugin settings allow users to disable the fetching of off-chain assets for maximum security.

That way, Massa allows deploying fully decentralized code-is-law apps, as it was meant to be !

To close the loop, we can imagine dumping a copy of the source code of Massa and surrounding tools in the filestore of an on-chain smart contract.

Filestore

From the point of the node, this functions just like another extra binary datastore in the SCE ledger, but indexed by a max-255-char string (instead of hash) and we call it the "filestore".

Browser plugin

TODO