What we’ve been up to

At Datawallet, we are building a sustainable and revolutionary data ownership platform that takes advantage of blockchain technology’s decentralized, secure, and transparent nature, while providing an application that’s usable by anyone.

Over the past few months, we have been heads down in ‘buidl’ mode, building out the Datawallet platform and all its accompanying infrastructure. For those of you that have not been following us from the very beginning, our core mission and vision have always been that all data should be owned, controlled and utilized by the people who create it — the users! That’s why we have been developing Datawallet: a free, all-in-one, digital wallet that empowers everyone to securely source, store and use data.

Early on, we realized that we could not rely on existing service APIs for users to source their data, as the data endpoints receivable via these APIs have been (and will be) significantly decreased because: 1) companies want to maintain a data advantage and have found “safer” ways to leverage but not share that data; and 2), data increased PR and regulatory pressures related to scandals such as Cambridge Analytica. Therefore, we have built out proprietary data pipelines and mechanisms that utilize the users’ ability to request their own data to be downloaded, and sends the data directly into their Datawallets (meaning Datawallet never sees your data). This involved some heavy duty data engineering, and we recently held a contest to battle test these new data flows, in which they functioned admirably.

Our other main area of development (apart from front-end) for the past few months has been our blockchain tech. In our minds delivering true data ownership requires blockchain technology to provide users decentralized, self-sovereign Datawallets. After a lot of experimentation and thought, we have a clear path forward and are excited to announce that our upcoming technical app release will have an associated testnet.

The rest of this summary will run you through the development done and the conclusions drawn from our work, as well as providing a brief overview of what’s to come in the next few weeks & months.

Blockchain experiments and learnings

Initial testing began using BigchainDB as a distributed database with blockchain characteristics and some of the desired core feature set of the envisioned Datawallet platform: decentralized control, immutability, transfer of digital assets, and an extended blockchain datastore.

This very preliminary development phased included:

Deploying and usage of core transactional assets (tokens)

Registration of datastore on-chain

We created a new DXT token over BigchainDB (you need to use UTXOs like in the Bitcoin protocol) which could be transferred

However, we soon realized that there were some problems with this implementation. Mainly, rolling out our own private instance was not secure enough. Further, the lack of processing capabilities impeded us from creating a proper escrow and we had the problem that we couldn’t connect the new token to the ERC20 DXT token.

BigchainDB is better for storing structured data, While Ethereum is best suited for processing. So rather than storing structured data in Ethereum, that should be in BigchainDB (or so we thought at the time).

At the same time, we started working on our Ethereum POC for the following reasons:

Users could acquire these products (data was taken from their local Datawallets, a proof-of-existence (hash) was written in BigchainDB and the raw data was sent to the creator of the product).

We implemented escrow capabilities in the backend.

We created APIs and UIs for all parties.

We also began sketching a Data Marketplace.

Comparisons of initial test technology conclusions:

Ethereum was more mature than BigchainDB.

We already had our ERC20 token to satisfy the smart contracts.

Ethereum’s processing capabilities allowed us to implement a complex escrow.

We didn’t plan to write user’s data in the blockchain, only hashes, so we wanted to try implementing some simple contracts that could be both cheap and fast to execute.

Our first Ethereum POC included:

Execution controlled by Smart Contracts

APIs and UI for all parties to interact with the blockchain

Developers could register themselves and deploy new products

Users could acquire these products by transferring some DXT tokens that were able to be put in escrow

Once a product was acquired, the user’s data was sent to an execution environment (which had a copy of the product’s code) where the analysis was executed; then the results were sent to the developer and the escrow was finished

After testing the capabilities of Solidity and Ethereum, the common industry assumptions were confirmed about the lack of scalability of the EVM when delivering comprehensive business and marketplace functions. However, there was still a lot of promise with Ethereum seemingly getting closer to solving their scaling issues (keywords here are bridging, i.e. interchain support).

What lies ahead

As the industry and technology ecosystem is evolving, the development of scalable systems is now becoming a reality with horizontal scaling solutions (of which multi-chain is a prominent example), and therefore we decided to implement a more complete MVP before releasing a full production version.

This included:

All capabilities from the POC, but integrated into Datawallet’s Plugin & UI

Integration into the new local data store (a big step towards the vision of self-sovereign Datawallets)

Data attestation on-chain, meaning ensuring that data remains unchanged and cannot be manipulated

Integration to Satellite sites; these are applications that can be powered by the data in your Datawallet, and compliant Satellites can be run locally to act as a first-order secure execution environment

A full escrow with history of payments on-chain; although, since we decided to do the execution on the client side, we decided to adopt the parsimonious solution and let users acquire the product immediately with no escrow for the current release

The launch of a private Ethereum network to be able to test token and data flows with DXT underpinning all transactions; this includes a public Blockchain Explorer, a private Stats Dashboard and potentially a public geth node so that anyone can connect to the blockchain and a faucet to provide Ether

We are now ready to launch the product acquisition blockchain flow with free products and test how everything works. Subsequently, we will officially launch our testnet with products costing (testnet) DXT.

We now have developed the foundation from which a developer ecosystem can flourish. This includes a sovereign local Datawallet and automated data pipelines to incorporate people’s data at the push of a button. Developers can now utilize this never before available resource and build the next generation of personalized applications. As data ownership is our primary goal, all applications require a user’s express opt-in and permissioning of clearly listed datapoints before the app can access that data. To this end, our developer outreach will commence soon, following our updated blockchain website, roadmap and technical documentation.

We will also publish the first article of our five-part strategic series tomorrow. The series dives into a broader strategic look at the blockchain space, its developments and our considerations for how we are moving forward.

Last, but not least, with our updated Roadmap and the impending release, we’ll also publish articles that jump into the core aspects of how Datawallet works, compare current achievements to our whitepaper, and lay the foundation for the upcoming data ownership revolution.