DApps, DAO’s, and Apartment Hunting: Everyday Blockchain Privacy Solutions

Use cases for Keep from partners, advisors, and daily life

One of the discussions we often have with the team is — how do you explain Keep to people who are new to the idea of blockchain privacy, smart contracts, or how a decentralized ledger works? It can be tricky to imagine how exactly Keep can be implemented in real life. In this article we will focus specifically on some examples of why we need Keep.

Let’s start with taking a situation that is familiar to many — renting or buying an apartment. This process normally takes an unnecessarily large amount of time and exposure of sensitive information. The system is set up this way — people and institutions need to have information to be able to trust us and make decisions about us. And this system sometimes fails.

Recently, Equifax suffered a horrible security incident, exposing up to 143 million people’s personal information, including Social Security, driver’s license, and credit card numbers.

If some time ago this process involved trust often based on knowing the person face to face, in the modern international web world that trust aspect is removed. The distances became closer, we have more encounters, experiences, we are able to travel and work remotely (hello, Keep, the remote-first team!) — the internet certainly did a great job here. However, as we move around the planet, renting places and buying things, the trust of the closed local community is not there anymore, and we certainly do not have a clue of who is that person who we give our sensitive details to.

The credit agency problem sounds like a good fit for a blockchain. There are competing parties — lender vs consumer, lender vs lender, and consumer vs hacker. Lenders want information on consumers, but don’t want to help competitors assess risk. Consumers want access to credit, but don’t want their personal information to fall into the wrong hands.

Now, imagine sharing your personal data on a public blockchain. That would mean instead of sending your sensitive information to just one person (or through an intermediary like Equifax), you would instead publish it to a database shared publicly throughout all of the world. That means things that you would normally share to get an apartment like your bank information, your social security number, your credit score, and all your previous addresses and landlords would be published for everyone to see and use however they’d like to.. Not exactly the direction we’d like to move, huh?

“Recently we have seen more private blockchains being announced, but the TRUE decentralized blockchains are the PUBLIC blockchains. “ — Axel Blikstad, Certified Financial Analyst.

Lack of privacy on public blockchains was exactly the problem Matt Luongo and Corbin Pon have stumbled upon while building their project Fold. For more details on the privacy issues, you can familiarize yourself with the “Privacy on the blockchain series” written by Matt Luongo.

“Think electronic medical records, identity verification, credential management, autonomous sales of digital goods, and the significant chunk of traditional finance that can’t safely operate on an open ledger. This also includes many types of trading and lending.” — Matt Luongo

Without the ability to keep private data private, it is a questionable improvement, and if you are an entrepreneur, you might find yourself wondering if it is actually possible to use public blockchain at the state it is in at the moment. This means delays in mass adoption. We took control of the network, but there is a significant missing piece. How can we share, analyse, and collaborate using data without exposing the data itself? That’s where Keep comes in. Imagine we don’t need to rely on a central source (read: single point of failure). Imagine if we could control how that data is shared and we don’t have to worry about the person or institution on the other end storing, managing or sharing either. Instead we can build systems and rules (read: smart contracts) for how it’s shared — safely.

We use keeps, or small off-chain containers, to secure and store this data. Keeps provide a bridge between the world of public blockchains and private information.

It will enable individuals and institutions to make a decision about you without seeing every detail of your life, allowing smart contracts to interact with off-chain, private data, with the help of cryptography tool called secure multi-party computation.

Multi-party computation is the missing key to autonomous privacy on the blockchain. And, it turns out, the blockchain fixes a core issue holding back multi-party computation from wider spread usage.

Have a look for a more detailed explanation on sMPC here. In short — and coming back to the apartment example — the bank/landlord has the sequence of things that needs to be checked before concluding if you can or can not have that apartment. Those things can be the following: whether your credit score is above a certain threshold, whether your bank balance is satisfactory (lets say — if you have 40x times rent in your account), a proof of not owing any taxes, etc. All these things that needs to be checked are written as a code, which would run on the information that is split across everyone’s computers that are in the network and compute the result of that. Without anyone having seen any of the information! So we have the process where we can make this decision based on the data without revealing the data itself.

“Keep is taking something novel and theoretical like sMPC and pairing it with real world incentive models to solve pressing challenges for the decentralized ecosystem” — James Prestwich, the former COO of Storj and a founder Summa, one of Keep advisors and whiteboard collaborators.

James also believes that one of the early and key benefits of Keeps will be the creation and signing of transactions on other blockchains. This includes Bitcoin and Litecoin wallets owned and managed by Ethereum contracts.

Another Keep advisor, Luis Cuende, shared his vision for using Keep in his project Aragon , a platform for decentralized governance built on Ethereum, and how perfectly Keep fits in there. Read more on his thoughts and our collaboration in this article.

“One of the use cases we have on the roadmap for Aragon is having shared encrypted data vaults for DAOs — and I’d totally see Keep being a key part of it.”

Luis has also explained there how Keep solution closes the circle of building the Dead Man Switch on a blockchain. Dead Man Switch is a very handy function and it can be used in a wide range of cases. It allows contracts to automatically activate to expose instructions and transfer funds. With Keep you would be able to publish a secret into a smart contract that will be revealed only under certain conditions you decide on — say, transferring your assets to your loved ones in case you don’t log in into your Twitter for 3 months. Or having a backup for your funds in case you lose the password. Pretty neat, isn’t it?

Now here’s another example of what Keep can do — make selling digital goods easier. Let’s say I am a musician, and I have this file with some music I made that I want to sell. I uploaded it to a secret place, and encrypted it. Now I cannot just publish that secret key on a chain for everyone to see it. And I am also not going to be able to have a constant online access for e-mailing the key to my buyer. So I put the key into a keep. When someone sends the price of my song to the smart contract, the contract automatically releases the key to them, and they decrypt the file and play it. Keep can be autonomous and transact on your behalf.

We are also partners with district0x — a project that another advisor of Keep, Joe Urgo, has founded. district0x is a collective of decentralized marketplaces and communities. Read more on our joint forces in this article.

“At district0x, we aim to allow anyone to create their own markets and begin selling goods within a matter of minutes. Keep provides a perfect solution for creators looking to sell music, images, and other types of digital art. We also envision members of districts leveraging Keep to privately share data necessary to effectively govern their district.” “Decentralized signing can pave the way for a faster trustless stack for our web dApps, allowing users to forego transactions that would normally need to propagate on-chain in favor of off-chain notarized attestation.”- Joe Urgo

The other innovative project in the space we are really excited to be working with is Lendroid. Lendroid is a decentralized digital asset lending protocol and platform. You can read on our partnership here and our interview with Vignesh Sundaresan, the Project Lead for Lendroid, here.

“Keep fits a key requirement of our protocol like a glove. The smart contract acts ‘human’, one with notary powers, who signs the offer off-chain. Gas cost is thus saved, transaction turnaround time is reduced, and overall efficiency is increased. Also for Lendroid, integrating with Keep is a nice experience of its compatibility with other protocols in the ecosystem.”

Did all of these use cases got your imagination going? Come in and share your ideas on Keep use cases with us on Slack, or tell us on Twitter.

We’ve made significant development updates to the Keep Network and our data privacy protocol lately. Our developers have pushed forward achieving major development milestones on the random beacon. We shared an early look at it in action. We have also provided detailed guide on Random Beacon Alpha API, how to communicate with the contract and an overview of its methods defined by our alpha API. And we have built a random avatar app as an example of what can be done with it. Our Slack community had some good fun with that one!

Keep is a big step forward and opens up endless possibilities for blockchain developers. We are constantly exploring new partnerships and opportunities to collaborate. As Keep is a platform improvement and not any one specific solution, it’s essential for us to encourage even more people, projects, and ideas to come build with us. If you are an organization, project or dApp developer interested in building with Keep, the best first step is to contact our team on Slack and discuss what you’re working on.

This revolution needs our joint efforts!

For more information on how Keep works have a look at our latest draft of the whitepaper and our business primer.

Special thanks to Antonio Salazar Cardozo for explaining Keep to the team in the context of his recent apartment hunt.

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