Ruby Protocol Monthly Review — July 2022
Fellow Rubies,
Welcome back to Ruby Protocol.
July was a good month for Ruby Protocol but not for privacy and data security. The growing prevalence of data hacks has almost become a norm in the online world, which makes our services known and desired by more and more people who want to take active measures against these incidents.
Below is a list of the recent data breaches that exposed millions of people to risks of identity theft, discrimination, reputational damage, and many more forms of threats.
- On July 4, unknown hackers claimed to have stolen data on as many as a billion Chinese residents after breaching a Shanghai police database. Experts call it the largest cybersecurity breach in China’s history.
- In July 2022, Marriott International confirmed that hackers had stolen 20 gigabytes of sensitive data in June 2022. The breach resulted from a social engineering attack.
- On July 19, 2022, a hacker posted data on 69 million Neopets users for sale on an online forum. The leak included personal data such as name, email address, date of birth, zip code, and more, as well as 460 MB of compressed source code for the Neopets website.
- On July 21st, 2022, a hacker posted on Breach Forums that they had obtained personal data on 5.4 million Twitter users, including email addresses and phone numbers. This data was obtained by exploiting a vulnerability to scrape data from Twitter.
Please understand that this short list above only includes the incidents that were deemed “newsworthy” by media outlets, and this short list does not represent our reality fully.
Awareness Building
You can’t solve a problem you don’t understand. That is why this remains and will remain one of our top priorities. Building privacy and data awareness are extremely important because it helps our audiences understand our philosophy and products. In the bigger picture, such efforts will benefit everyone.
In July, we tried different ways and worked with different parties to push privacy and data awareness.
On July 4th, we held a community AMA with CryptoDiffer to talk about what Ruby Protocol is doing and how it can help data owners.
We shared our thoughts on the current technology and the landscape of this digital age. We tried to answer the big question of what this means for us.
On July 20th, we came back with another AMA to answer the community’s top questions about Ruby Protocol
On 29th July Crypto Talkz held an AMA with Ruby Protocol
Expanding Global Ambassador Program
On Jul 18th, we decided to expand our Global Protocol Ambassador and launch RPA V2.0. With this program, we wanted to bring more crypto talents into the Ruby family.
For Ruby Protocol Ambassadors (RPAs) V2.0, we are hoping for:
- An additional 15–20 RPA’s to cover different cultures
- An additional list of RPA to replace the inactive members to create healthy competition and stimulus.
The Ambassador program application was closed on JULY 28th. We will announce the next group very soon.
Ruby Insights
It cannot be stressed enough that, in the 21st century, data explains our reality. If you face it, you can understand it, and then you can do something about it. If not, everything human cooperation strives for might be chipped away insidiously.
Now and then, the Ruby Protocol team would publish lengthy and well-researched articles to bring light to the harsh reality that the odds are against us, to warn us that we need to stay vigilant and to explain why Ruby Protocol is an answer.
- A Small Thesis on the Necessity of Ruby Protocol & Web3 tries to use the recent data breach incidents as examples to explain why centralizing data is so dangerous and why Ruby Protocol and Web3 work in favor of you and me.
- Ruby Protocol & Dataism tries to simplify what Dataism represents and break the naive utopian future where data and the almighty algorithms could somehow unshackle humans.
The alarm bell must ring. That is the point of Ruby Protocol and Web3.
Ruby Protocol and Its Friends
We are excited about the partnership recap because in July we made substantial progress in growing our business and our ecosystem. We believe these partnerships can help Ruby Protocol in improving our knowledge base, business opportunities, and potential talent base.
- On July 19th, Ruby Protocol joined hands with Prove Anything, an open protocol for proof and authenticity built on the blockchain that connects people and brands to the Web3 world through the products they own.
- On July 26th, we announced a strategic partnership with DoraHacks, an active global developer community and leading hacker organization that will help us create a developer talent pool from all over the world.
- On July 28th, OnFinality, Polkadot’s leading blockchain infrastructure provider, added Ruby Network Spec to its marketplace supporting over 60 networks. Working together, we will eventually bring data privacy and ownership to reality.
- The next day, on July 29th, Ruby Protocol officially entered a strategic partnership with Tribe, Singapore’s first government-supported blockchain ecosystem builder, that connects talents and global opportunities to drive the frontier tech ecosystem forward.
Technical Development
July’s technical development mostly revolved around expanding our ecosystem. For instance, the tech team was working on creating a network based on Ruby’s Docker image with OnFinality. It will allow us to deploy our nodes into it, which will speed up the development and deployment of the Ruby network.
In addition, the tech team is also working on creating an archive based on the Subsquid project, which will be officially announced in August. So please stay tuned.
Ruby’s research team was working on various topics:
- Given the fact that many projects such as DYDX are switching from the layer-2 of Ethereum ecosystem to Cosmos, and Ruby intends to be a multi-chain protocol, we have done some research on the pros and cons of Cosmos and Ethereum ecosystem. We have also published the Ruby architecture that is compatible with EVM.
- We researched the decentralization of attribute authorities and simplified the ZKP scheme for the SBP milestones.
- Last but not least, we have been talking to a few professors from top universities, and will be onboarding these professors in early August.
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.
