Data Ownership Protocol; a balance between transparency and confidentiality? | Selective transparency on Ethereum

When we say that a blockchain gives us control or power over our information, is it really so? Beyond what we consider as decentralization and transparency there are some nuances that we do not take into account, and that is that our financial information is exposed not only to the entire chain but to everyone who explores it without belonging to it.

The importance of keeping certain transactions secret is very necessary when dealing with large volumes. Let's imagine that we are recurring users who make a large number of transactions for important values. What we would not want would be for that information to fall into the wrong hands where they can see our transaction history and account balance (possible through a block explorer).

DOP is presented as a data ownership protocol in which we will be able to choose what information we want to share or hide. It is now in its testing phase but it is estimated to be launched early next year, and after the tests I have done, I can say that what is coming is something very interesting.

Privacy and confidentiality seem to be guaranteed, as one of the tests I have done allowed me to encrypt some tokens to transfer them and not leave a single trace of the transaction. The block explorer was empty but I could access the ID of the transaction, which surprised me a lot.

By having the possibility of choosing what we want to share in a precise way, we achieve a balance between transparency and confidentiality. According to the leaders of the project, this would make the adoption of cryptocurrencies grow enormously, as it seems to be counterproductive to have total transparency in which anyone can see the movements we make on a daily basis. This is something that banks manage to solve but at the cost of centralization, something that cryptocurrencies will never want to share, or at least the communities that follow such a cryptographic project.

Something that I find very interesting is the way DOP works. By using off-chain calculations, they test the validity of the data using Zero Knowledge technology, or rather Zero Knowledge Proof (ZKP). In this way, and under my understanding, it interprets the information parallel to the chain and converts it into encrypted data through the protocol to return it to the blockchain, in this case the Ethereum blockchain.

Another thing that strikes me is what the project itself is looking for in terms of the security of the protocol as the users who will use it. It is at a stage where pre-auditing is the priority, and to that end a team made up of white hat hackers, who have worked for the FBI before, is looking to have the protocol audited by large leading firms, which should ensure a robust and secure product.

As for the legality of the project, there are legal firms that are inspecting DOP so that it is a legitimate project to ensure that everything fits correctly.

In my opinion these last two points are fundamental for the project to prosper and with that the protocol is within the parameters that allow its adoption. Of course, it might still be too early to draw conclusions and we should wait for the release of the final (mainnet?) version.

There are also two other points I would like to mention:

On the one hand there will be a DAO that will manage blacklisting accounts that are fraudulently using the protocol, and as expected, a committee will be used to make the appropriate decisions. On the other, a KYC that does not require the disclosure of the user's identity but only requires the aforementioned ZKP to verify it.

Finally, we know that through a block explorer (Etherscan) we can see the information of any account and its transactions, although if we use a DOP address, we should be shown information.

Under this circumstance DOP seeks to have its own explorer in which we can see the information that only we want to share, and it will be through an interface similar to a social profile where we can see things such as NFTs, tokens in possession, the transactions we have made, among other things.

In conclusion, I believe that we are facing something that could change everything in the course of time. Yes it is true that for the moment it is a decision for us whether to use this protocol or not; however, I believe that many other projects will be analyzing this technology in order to implement something similar. The best example we can have at our disposal is the Monero blockchain; that network in which transactions are untraceable, impossible or at least very complex.