CommPRO.biz Editorial Staff

Non-profit Tide Foundation, aiming to make privacy profitable, announced it has filed multiple patents for its technology that would allow consumers to interact in the ecosystem without the typical friction points stunting mainstream adoption of blockchain technology.

“We’ve patented the technology, then open sourced it in order to grant unrestricted access for all participants in the ecosystem while keeping them protected against patent trolls – something we see is widely ignored in the open source community,” said Yuval Hertzog, Co-Founder Tide Foundation.

The core concept of the Tide Protocol is to encrypt all sensitive consumer data held by businesses, and hand the only key back to the consumer. Those businesses can then utilize and trade that data only with consumers’ permission and by sharing any compensation.

The team recognized early on that the ‘trustless’ benefits of blockchain come with a heavy burden on end users. Finding a way to remove the associated crypto complexities would be vital for the concept to work at scale.

This led Tide to pioneer a fully decentralized mechanism to replace the notorious public/private key management with a simple and familiar username and password authentication. The mechanism uses a collection of trustless nodes, each performing an indiscernible fragment of the process and new cryptography that enables an entire node swarm to blindly determine whether a user has been authenticated correctly.

The process of creating a wallet that holds a consumer’s data sharing preferences on the blockchain, can now be seamlessly and fully integrated into an existing UX of a business, even a website, without the need to download any software.

“Tide’s technology is opening a world of possibility within an industry that has been rife with trust, security, accuracy and compensation issues.” said Michael Loewy, Co-Founder of Tide Foundation. “The ability to not only control, but automate consent to share data without compromising its security is revolutionary; and Tide sees this as a chance to realize a true personal data economy where everyone wins.”

Source: Blockchain Wire