From Fully Decentralized Username / Password Authentication, Seamless Web UX Integration to Wallet Automation – All Built into Its Open Source Data Privacy Protocol.
Tide Foundation, the non-profit creators of Tide Protocol, aiming to make privacy profitable, has 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.
Perhaps most ground-breaking is the ability to automate wallet functions, such as authorizing a data trade on behalf of a user, without their explicit interaction or even their need to be online.
While centralized functionality addressing these issues are commonplace, fully trustless solutions to date are typically cumbersome or have significant limitations – all inhibiting adoption by a mainstream audience.
“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.”
About Tide Foundation – Tide is a not-for-profit, community-driven foundation charged with the stewardship and mass adoption of the Tide protocol – a decentralized, open source infrastructure powering a new personal data economy. Tide is founded by a diverse team, representing a wide range of stakeholders, including media agency heads, bank chief economists, cryptography professors, forward thinking politicians and tech entrepreneurs. For more, visit https://tide.org/.
