With Blockchain taking over, Privacy and Security isn’t a choice anymore!

Infrastructure has come to the world of technology as a virtue and is a must-have with so many devices and machines functioning 24/7. These devices generate a huge amount of data including the data associated with us, our inputs and our operations. We needed faster methods of data transfer, we needed bigger storage and off course faster computing to deal with huge data chunks. The security and privacy also starting gaining huge importance with decentralized solutions using Blockchain or centralized enterprise systems.

Amid the data explosion, came technologies like AI/ML, IOT and Blockchain, with a primary goal to support the futuristic models on how the data is to be stored, shared and computed upon. However, the fast pace of adoption and demands led to a scenario with a lot of important factors lacking attention.

Data breach and monopoly of the tech giants

If we see Bitcoin or Ethereum and its capability to allow anyone to verify transactions, it was remarkable how it started a new landscape of transparency but on the other side it also left open space allowing tracking of people based upon their spending habits. This was just the beginning of one of the many ways user data breach could happen. Initially everyone thought that Blockchain as a new technology can prevent where the top tech companies across the globe are monopolizing their user’s data and offer a peer to peer alternative. Blockchain in itself wasn’t prepared for those real life implementations, it brought many promises but came along with many challenges.

On one hand cryptocurrencies emerged as a very strong viable alternative to the economy of the future, on the other, illicit goods and dark web marketplaces flocked to them to remain untouched. Some currencies even started using stealth addresses which took privacy to another level in terms of how a transaction is seen publicly.

Everything which we use in today’s time, app or hardware is programmed to track us. All the famous browsers sell our data and censor our searches. Each social media platform is busy being better at the cost of breaching individual privacy. Smart transportation and housing applications are prone to leak our travel routines and habits. It won’t stop as it benefits them and even if we want to do so then how do we do it?

What Blockchain as a Single ledger technology fails to address?

Peer to Peer solutions are the future where we control what we own, there are technologies which are coming in to enable the peer to peer application ecosystem. However, there are still huge gaps. Blockchains emerged as the most promising single leger technologies to facilitate peer to peer applications. However, looking at a wider range of sectors and markets, we can undoubtedly say that only a small fraction of projects have a visible path for becoming a decentralised application. Reason behind this is the underlying single ledger technology which can excel when it comes to public information and transparent executions but cannot at the same time ensure privacy, security and cheap transactions.

The problem is the single ledger itself which as a protocol works in a straightforward way to maintain the source of truth with everyone in the network despite many of the participants not having anything to do with the knowledge/information/records itself.

While the single yet distributed technologies will continue to scale and expand, they are not designed for the purpose of applications such as Youtube, Netflix, Uber or Airbnb.

What’s really missing?

Current P2P technology can provide for a token economic model to be present in a transparent manner, but cannot represent the actual services exchanged between the involved parties. This is primarily due to lack of:

• Missing privacy in distributed technology for public use cases.
• Missing technology which allows secure yet verifiable private data sharing between involved parties.
• Missing a decision making framework (like smart-contract from blockchain) which can function upon the selective data so as to only create a consensus between the involved parties in a service.
• Missing mechanism to provide and confirm identities of individuals/organisations which works in pure P2P mechanism and only conforms to demand based sharing and verification without having to compromise or expose the credential itself.
• The capability to abide by the understood compliances and regulations that a participant on a public wide platform can participate without compromising any trust.

zSCAPE is the next generation security and Privacy protocol for decentralised infrastructure. The goal of zSCAPE is to bridge the gap between the existing technologies and the privacy demands of real world peer to peer applications.

It unprecedentedly improves the level of security and privacy which can be achieved without compromising the level of decentralisation. It functions on top of a decentralised network of TEE devices which is a pool of resources contributed by its users.

Originally published at https://zscape.io on October 30, 2021.