Perhaps the most salient philosophical shift in technology over the past few years has been about privacy. Looking backwards, it is clear the foundations of the stellar returns and impressive growth of today’s technology giants were built on user data. Historically, this was a deal consumers were generally happy to make (or at the very least they were ambivalent). The outcome was Internet users receiving free services at the price of their personal data.
For reasons that are widely known and too extensive to explore here, consumer behavior is changing, and that change is accelerating. The problem now facing technology companies is delivering privacy-conscious products with the scale, performance, and low cost that consumers still demand. One answer is to absorb the costs of data compliance internally, but that hurts profitability. Another solution is to charge customers more, but that will unavoidably cause at least a few customers to leave. 180Protocol is another solution. 180Protocol is a novel application framework that allows the secure and efficient use of private data in applications. It has been built solve the problem of ensuring privacy without sacrificing performance.
180Protocol uses what we term collaborative computing. Collaborative computing is confidential computing used together by multiple parties, or, in other words, collaboratively. While confidential computing is an emerging technology, it is by no means novel. At the core of confidential computing are secure computing enclaves run using specialized hardware. The two leading hardware platforms are Intel SGX and AMD EPYC. Frameworks for interacting with enclaves are being developed by many of the leading technology giants, including Microsoft and Google, as well as smaller technology players like R3. 180Protocol sits a layer above confidential computing platforms like R3’s Conclave and Microsoft Azure Confidential Computing. We provide mechanisms for collaboration, coordination, and rewards that can be integrated directly into the leading confidential computing solutions.
To this end, 180Protocol makes deploying confidential computing easier. This is a problem others are seeking to solve as well. Microsoft also offers a coordination and usability layer called the Azure Confidential Ledger. Nevermined offers a collaborative computing solution targeted at enterprise data sharing. Anjuna tackles the problem from a different direction, making confidential computing more accessible through infrastructure-as-a-service offerings. Adding coordination mechanisms to a confidential computing solution is critical, but further problems remain to be solved.
Collaborative computing can be targeted at many different use cases, including data sharing. From a business lens, 180Protocol has been designed to make data sharing safer and easier. By doing that, it makes unlocking insights from that data more lucrative. With the vast amounts of data available these days, it is only natural that many established businesses and startup ventures are focused on facilitating better data sharing. Snowflake, as the leading enterprise data cloud, is building data sharing solutions within their ecosystem. Within the Web 3.0 space, Ocean Protocol facilitates privacy-preserved analytics using a proprietary compute-to-data framework. Secret Network introduces embeds privacy directly in smart contracts, allowing the development of private dApps. Cere Network is the decentralized Snowflake, of which facilitation of secure data sharing is a key component. Data sharing, however, should be a two way street, and that is what makes 180Protocol unique. Like the solutions above, 180Protocol can power the flow of data, but it also powers rewards flowing back the other way. This piece of the value chain is critical to delivering a more attractive and usable value proposition for business customers.
180Protocol combines the best of both worlds, bridging emerging privacy technologies with the ethos of rewarding data owners that we see in Web 3.0. We are an application framework that uses collaborative computing not just to ensure privacy, but to directly reward users. It is a new model for application development, and a new toolkit for unlocking the value of data.
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