How Forward Thinking Organizations Like Finminity, Ocean Protocol, Numbers, and UTU Enable Trust for the Trustless
Blockchain Technology requires no trusted third party intermediary. So how can we trust these applications?
Bitcoin was the first blockchain application and it allows users to transfer money without any trusted third party intermediaries. This is numerous advantages in terms of custody, speed, and cross border transactions.
However, the trustless nature of such a network enables bad actors to enter the system. There are phishing attacks, fake transactions, 51% attacks, scams, rug-pulls, Ponzi schemes, and the list goes on. For blockchain technology to reach mainstream adoption.. infrastructure, protocols, and ecosystems need to be developed enable decentralized trust. Users in this new world need to be protected more than ever as there is not central authority to reverse a transaction :)
Scam and Rug-pull Prevention at Project Inception
With the explosion of DeFi and the popularity of anonymous teams, there are new scams and rug-pulls every single day. It’s common for new projects to pop up, have a lot of hype, maybe raise money to build the project, launch on Uniswap, maybe add some initial liquidity, attract other liquidity providers + traders, mint a huge number of new tokens, dump those tokens, and walking away with all the raised funds.
These scams and rug-pulls exit without meeting any commitments and leave the majority of investors high and dry.
One interesting approach to solving this issue is at the fundraising level. Tokensale platforms can conduct extensive DD and lock funds raised based on milestones.
When investing on Finminity, the funds raised (Investors’ money ) is kept in Client Money Account and the equivalent amount of Escrow Tokens (stable coins) is created and securely kept in the Blockchain smart contract. The funds are disbursed only after the company achieves its set milestone and after it achieves 50% or more votes passed by the token holders. This is managed by Finminity’s Decentralized Autonomous Organisation (DAO) Smart Contract.
They announced their Presale on LID Protocol if you’re interested in learning more:
https://blog.goodaudience.com/finminity-the-most-rewarding-and-flexible-tokensale-platform-for-startups-and-smes-4b76216b4f09
https://sale.lid.sh/finminity
Interview with CryptoWendyO
Trust at the Data Source Level
The next layer of trust can be embedded within the data that applications work with as well. If one can verify the authenticity of the data being used, then one can establish that data being presented to users is valid and real.
In Ocean Protocol, each data service gets its own datatoken. Use Ocean Market to publish data, stake on data (curate), and buy data. Earn by selling, staking, or running your own fork of Ocean Market. Data has automatic price discovery. Data is published as interoperable ERC20 datatokens. Compute-to-data enables private data to be bought & sold. It's a decentralized exchange (DEX), tuned for data.
The most valuable data is private data — using it can improve research and business outcomes. But concerns over privacy and control make it hard to access. With Compute-to-Data, private data isn’t directly shared but rather specific access to it is granted.
It can be used for data sharing in science or technology contexts, or in marketplaces for selling private data while preserving privacy, as an opportunity for companies to monetize their data assets.
Private data can help research, leading to life-altering innovations in science and technology. For example, more data improves the predictive accuracy of modern Artificial Intelligence (AI) models and massive distributed compute networks like Raven Protocol thrive on that data.
Private data is often considered the most valuable data because it’s so hard to get at, and using it can lead to potentially big payoffs. The acts of publishing data, purchasing data, and consuming data are all recorded on the blockchain to make a tamper-proof audit trail.
One interesting company working specifically on the tamper-proof audit trail use case is Numbers. Please watch this quick explanation from Tammy Yang (Founder and CEO) and Bofu Chen (Founder and CTO) on how Numbers uses blockchain and cryptography to safely trace the origin of the data being distributed.
Trust Oracles and Trust Infrastructure
The Chainlink Network provides the largest collection of tamperproof, on-chain price reference data available. Sponsored by leading dApps and now securing over $4 billion in DeFi, these decentralized oracle networks are enabling developers across the globe to build more advanced and reliable smart contracts. That enables reliable trust in price. Can we provide oracles for general trust?
At UTU, they believe in a more human-friendly internet. They are pioneering digital models of trust built around human beings and how we naturally trust. UTU’s vision is to become the trust infrastructure of the entire internet, replacing anonymous star ratings, reviews, and scores as the de facto trust mechanisms of digital commerce. They do this in service of their mission to protect data and privacy as we help make the internet a safer, more trusted place to gather, share, work, and trade.
This might be baked directly into blockchains (Elrond and Matic are both partners of UTU) or they might be directly integrated into different applications (Travala integration). UTU will just be the default trust infrastructure wherever you go.
Trust at the Data Source, Trust Infrastructure, and better DD or just a few solutions to enable trust for the trustless. How would you solve it?
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