Ruby Protocol — The Importance of Bringing Privacy to Multiple Chains
No Turning Back
It is pretty clear that, after decades of the internet, the temptation to collect/analyze/hack/sell data is too strong for many private companies, governments, and other groups to resist.
“When we designed the network, we didn’t have a specific purpose in mind. We didn’t care what the application was. We simply wanted to get packets from one point to another.” said Vint Cerf, an American Internet pioneer who is recognized as one of “the fathers of the Internet”.
The internet’s blindness can be traced back to its military origins, where nodes on the edge of the network needed to pull down information from centralized data centers. Those origins led to a series of benchmarks that still apply today. And it is showing no sign of a reverse trend.
All of them are making the internet what it is today. And after decades of the internet, we must learn, at this point, that the always belated public policies are failing to protect us from this irreversibly deteriorating trend.
At the very beginning, we were overly optimistic about the policies. Then we realized the frustrating challenges of ensuring some consistency in delivery at the subnational level. But ultimately, we underestimated how inadequate the collaborative policymaking was and how often the political cycles changed.
What is even scarier today is that governments are following the old internet thinking to tighten the surveillance of traditional finance with CO2 points on credit cards, removal of cash, CBDCs, and social credit scores. All of which makes people not believe they will ever allow any competition or a different system with different rules, privacy, and freedoms.
Building it From Scratch
The recent Tornado Cash sanction and Mailchimp deactivating crypto accounts with no warning show that people in power really hate crypto.
“If we want an alternative, we better build it quickly.” people say.
Some argue that crypto needs a “rules-based environment” to attract real institutional capital into the digital-asset industry, and much of that regulation needs to stamp out protocols like Tornado Cash. Such an insidious statement forgets one fundamental idea that privacy itself is a rule, which underlies every human action. It provides safety, control, the right to grant access, and ultimately freedom.
These are problems of economics, and human nature, but also by design. The economics of the internet has created two new currencies: data and attention. A decentralized model with a privacy-protecting infrastructure would seek to put that data back in the hands of users rather than web giants. It is a daunting task, but the intention is simple: to try and level the playing field before it’s too late.
To build it from scratch is to make sure privacy is a default setting in the working environment and to design its origin to be people-centric. We argue this is our chance to make it right for us and our future generations, and we believe crypto is our tool for revolution.
One of the primary goals of Ruby Protocol is to bring privacy to multiple chains and make its services compatible with the broader environment. By doing it, we contribute to making it an environment that promotes privacy-building and propels its development in a new direction that makes us excited about our future.
Bringing Privacy to Multiple Chains & Ruby POC
Ruby protocol is a private data management framework for Web 3.0. It proposes and implements a privacy middle-layer interacting with multi-chain.
We aim to build a fine-grained private data access-control gateway across different entities and organizations both in the decentralized and traditional financial world. Built on functional encryption, the Ruby protocol will be the true embodiment of the decentralization spirit of the cryptocurrency movement.
Ruby Protocol will be compatible with different blockchains, including Polkadot, Ethereum, BNB Chain, Solana, Avalanche, Polygon, etc. It is the ultimate solution to access control with privacy. To help you visualize our solutions, we plan to launch Ruby Protocol POC soon.
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.
The access control (AC) policy could be defined over any on-chain data such as the ownership of a particular NFT, how many DeFi tokens the user owns, whether he/she belongs to a particular DAO or the off-chain status such as whether he/she is older than a certain age. Only those satisfying the predefined AC policy can decrypt the encrypted message.
More concretely, in the Ruby POC, the SDK will encrypt a secret message using the symmetric key, which will be encrypted under the ABE scheme according to the AC policy. The AC policy will be specified as a smart contract that takes a user’s blockchain address and authority’s signature as input.
There will be independent attribute authorities responsible for verifying different attributes and distributing the attribute keys. An attribute authority will form as a Ruby node to perform these duties. When the node verifies that the user meets the predefined AC policy, the node client generates the attribute key, which will be delivered to the client’s SDK. The SDK decrypts the attribute key, with which it will decrypt the encrypted content. At the same time, the authority will generate a signature on the user’s blockchain address that will be accepted by the smart contract, which will serve as a record that the attribute authority has verified the user’s corresponding attribute.
References:
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/is-the-internet-broken-how-to-fix-it
https://news.vmware.com/apps-cloud/internet-is-broken
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25741292.2018.1540378
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/bitcoin-second-chance-for-muslim-world
https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/in-hong-kong-bitcoin-is-the-last-chance-for-freedom
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.
