Ruby Protocol Monthly Review — August 2022
Fellow Rubies,
Welcome back to Ruby Protocol.
We believe “tumultuous” is a good word to describe August. The one that most stood out for many of us in the crypto space was the targeting and sanction of Tornado Cash, a privacy & open-source protocol, which means that it’s uncensorable, permissionless, and completely trustless, and agnostic.
This incident marks a watershed point because for the first time the U.S. government has criminalized interaction with the software. We believe it is a clear escalation in the attempt to make cryptocurrencies fit into what the U.S. considers its financial control framework. The logical prediction would be other governments following in its footsteps, creating more pressure on the general crypto movement and giving it a criminal label.
Although it’s unknown how things will eventually play out over the coming months, it is becoming clear that the desires of crypto and the demands of 21st-century modern governments are not compatible.
That’s by design. That’s the point of Web3.
Fortunately, 61% of users have selected Option X: “Consider the censorship an attack on Ethereum and burn their stake via social consensus.”
This incident made us realize the most important job next to creating a protocol that makes privacy accessible to everyone is changing the other 39% of people’s obsolete ideas of how the future should unfold.
Ruby Protocol Stance on Tornado Cash Sanction
It is a blatant attack on privacy and growth. If free speech should be written into law to break the rising tide of the cancel culture, then technological free speech should be protected to break the shackles imposed on privacy, ideas, and growth.
In our opinion, Tornado Cash is the perfect representation of technological free speech and the significant growth resulting from it.
It is worth iterating that the sole purpose of Ruby Protocol is to make privacy accessible to everyone. It is the Decentralized Privacy-Centric Protocol for Web3.
We Are Having a War on Data
In this century, combatants in the new age cold war are fighting over the currency of the modern age: data (personal information). The battles are over who controls data. It seems to us that those who control it win the battle while those who do not are forced to slave away.
The people who believe that individuals have an absolute right to control their data will exercise the same kind of dominion over data that they do over their bodies or their personal property. And those that believe that personal data is good to be traded on the open market and thus subject to the same market forces at play elsewhere.
Protect yourself with Ruby Protocol.
Privacy First & Privacy Made Possible
There are contradictory concepts in the Web3 space. This is the promise of returning data ownership to the people while having complete transparency regarding blockchain transactions.
To fulfill these contradictory goals, privacy is the key.
Here are a few features we believe are indispensable to a promising privacy-first tool.
- A privacy-first approach to preserving anonymity needs to hide individuals through its privacy-preserving technologies.
- To enable the privacy-first feature, the data processing must be decentralized to avoid one single point of failure and inefficiency.
- Privacy is intimate, whose definition differs from one to another. It must allow users to customize its control.
- It must be compatible with larger organizations in preserving data privacy to avoid adoption friction.
Awareness Building Never Stops
In August, we tried different ways and worked with different parties to push privacy and data awareness.
On August 9th, we held our very first Ruby Protocol Meme Contest where we challenged and rewarded our community to use internet humor to shed light on the serious subjects of data safety and privacy.
Working with different patterns, we had amazing opportunities to speak with community members and gathered some honest feedback by hosting “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) sessions. We will continue using this format as this is a valuable forum for broad communication that gives us insight that would be hard to gain through any other means.
Ruby Protocol and Its Friends
On August 3rd, we partnered up with Subsquid, an indexing solution that enables Web3 builders to gain access to on-chain data on their terms.
The partnership was an effort to achieve a common goal of building a better infrastructure for the Web3 world. We are looking forward to working with Subsquid to make data and its analytics easy, accessible, and safe.
Technical Development
This month, our team focused its work on the to-be-launched Ruby Protocol POC. This POC should demonstrate that our design will fulfill the market requirements while providing a compelling case for adoption.
The main idea of our to-be-launched PoC is to allow a dApp to perform access control over encrypted data or even an encrypted event using attribute-based encryption (ABE) and a key encapsulation mechanism.
For more details on how our POC functions, please read more 👇
Small Milestone — 5,000 Followers
Yahyyy!! 🎈🎈 🎈
We are looking forward to a Privacy-First online experience for ALL!
About Us
Ruby Protocol is a cross-chain, privacy-first infrastructure, powered by Polkadot. Our layer-1 protocol utilizes Functional Encryption (FE) cryptography, which allows users to adopt a modular approach to data privacy and ownership. This novel solution will allow users to encrypt sensitive information on-chain, which can only be decrypted by holders of an approved private key.
Ruby’s FE Substrate-pallet will serve as the building blocks for privacy-first smart contract DApps building on the native Ruby Chain, while also acting as a privacy layer for Parachains and Web3 DApps across the Polkadot ecosystem.
