The first paragraph of Covalent.ai github wiki how page struck me deep.

The Internet is only as smart as the data it carries. Right now, data is mindless, easily exposed and abused. Imagine a new Internet composed of Smart Data that remembers, keeps a secret, learns from its users, and is open for good. COVA contributes to the making of this new Internet.

I watched some TV series sometimes back about the New Internet - Silicon Valley - where Richard Hendrick is so determined to build this type of decentralized internet that gives users utmost control over their data and privacy. It made a lot of sense to me and I was deeply keen in following the series which also happens to be my best tech based series of all time, awaiting the next season. I felt there is a possibility of what Richard Hendrick is aiming at achieving in the movie but I never thought of it coming out as a project in the real world, in the blockchain.

The New Internet

If we leave it the way it is, it means we are vulnerable as we speak, current internet protocol suite provides end-to-end data communication specifying how data should be packetized, addressed, transmitted, routed, and received but what about the way it is used? After the sent data reaches its destination where does it go from there? Who uses it after all? This are some deep questions that hasn't crossed my attention until now. I came across an article of an interview of various blockchain CEOs and Co-founders in a conference with projects centered around privacy most notable is Brendan Eich, Co-founder of Basic Attention Token (BAT) and read the excerpts from each of them; here is the one from Eich in quotes who is also the creator of popular java script programming language

When I started at Brave, the conventional wisdom was that privacy didn’t matter, people didn’t value privacy. I think this is false. I think we’re seeing it progressively over time rises in consciousness of importance of privacy

They all agreed to one truth, privacy is a very big deal but quite surprising also is the shocking revelation from the interview. As users we are not much concerned about our privacy, we sign various consent forms on the web even without reading the terms and conditions just to gain access thereby exposing our vulnerabilities to the outside world - to the project owners, the developers, the bad actors and thieves who may want to use our data against us. Even when we read and consent to the form how sure are we that this term/policy are enforced in reality?

Covalent.ai is bringing that change we so seek, that change that will protect every users out there of their data and privacy using a "Hardware + Software" approach.

The hardware refers to the lower layer of "Trusted Execution Environments (TEE)" a study in Wikipedia.org gave the following result:

A trusted execution environment (TEE) is a secure area of a main processor. It guarantees code and data loaded inside to be protected with respect to confidentiality and integrity. A TEE as an isolated execution environment provides security features such as isolated execution, integrity of applications executing with the TEE, along with confidentiality of their assets. In general terms, the TEE offers an execution space that provides a higher level of security than a rich mobile operating system open (mobile OS) and more functionality than a 'secure element" - Wikipedia.org

The software here refers to the upper layer of a Policy Specification Language (PSL) that specifies data usage policies in programming language and a Policy Enforcement Framework (PEF) that enforces the PSL through code. A reductive demo of the PSL + PEF setup is the implementation of usage policies commonly used in AI .

We could see a solid framework in the technical roadmap as the test-nets of both software and hardware are successfully concluded why the main-net is being built.

Hardware technical roadmap

Software technical roadmap

Smart data and the web 3.0 protocol

We're currently in an age where the world have gone totally smart in a whole lot of ways although not entirely, how did we miss the fact that our data could have been smart as well maybe among the first set of things to be worked upon and termed 'smart'. Hopefully the vision is there in Covalent.ai co-founders Vincent Li, a Harvard College alum and early employee of A16Z-backed Gigster.com and Raymond Gao, a Princeton University alum and early investor of Conjur (acquired by CYBR) as they embarked on what looks like a huge task in today world of high tech with little or no privacy - a data with it's own mind.

This data knows when to delete, when to store and entirely up to the sender to decide what happens to the data sent. Not to be scared it's only going to be an appendices of the current internet where you can still use your 'HTTP' 'FTP' and 'SSH' but if you crave security and control over your data you should use 'COVA' which is the Covalent.ai smart internet protocol. Like smart contract the COVA network uses a smart policy that can never be broken giving users total control of their data.

Covalent.ai has received over 10 million dollars of investment from FBG Capital, Huobi Capital, Bluehill, Alphacoin, Kenetic, ZhenFund, Metropolis VC, Node Capital, Alphabit, BA Capital, BlockVC, etc. This are really big companies with an eye in the future and seeing the potential of the project have put in quite some sum bringing which have seen to the current progress in project development. The COVA protocol is implemented with 7 layers which are somewhat beyond the scope of this article, listed in no particular order;

Data owner (Dapp and Data storage): This allows of total control of data by the user with indicators that marks sensitive information of the user also enables the data owners to process, encode, and encrypt the data offline in the security of their own personal computers.

Data catalogue blockchain: Data catalog blockchain is the decentralized ledger that holds the metadata of the datasets. Approved parties (generally, data owner or TEE) can update the ledger metadata; however, cannot delete the entry.

A pool of routing nodes and compute nodes

Threshold encrypted secret storage on routing nodes

Smart Policy Enforcer: Centrifuge and CovaVM running on TEE nodes

Market Economy: Payments and incentives

Data User Interface

The New Internet will provide us true data ownership, reduces chances of having our data used against us one way or the other, improve on existing business and bringing up new ones in the nearest future as some data sensitive projects may begin to emanate from here. Isn't it an exciting time already?

Some useful project links

Medium

Twitter

Telegram

Whitepaper