Blockchaining India’s big data
Does Zebi have what it takes?
“Our name, Zebi, comes from zebibyte, which is about one trillion gigabytes [one gigabyte is 1024 megabytes], which signifies large amounts of data,” explains Babu Mungala, CEO and co-founder of blockchain solutions company Zebi.
However, while it first started out as a big data company in 2015, Babu and his team soon realized that they couldn’t solve the other problems of big data without first tackling the issue of data security.
Babu learned about the importance of data security when he was talking to tech companies. This was naturally a big concern for them, especially with increasing cases of data leaks. At the same time, it is also an issue that many companies unfortunately do not want to deal with directly until a data leak or some data breach actually happens to them.
But the complexity of the problem fascinated him and became a driving force for him to seek a practical solution.
“If you think about it carefully, you will soon realise that proper data security is an impossible problem because while data is a high value asset, it cannot be stored away in lockers but still needs to be accessed by multiple employees of a company, partners, vendors, and so on,” he elaborates. “India alone is losing more than $35 million because of various data crimes like data leaks and data thefts.”
The Zebi team did extensive research, looking for machines that became read immediately after the first write and related mechanisms that cannot be overridden by humans. There were hardware-based solutions for implementing Write Once Read Many (WORM) patterns but they were expensive and not suitable for big data.
Looking for a problem to solve
For Babu, the seeds of starting his own company began when he was working in the San Francisco Bay Area from 1997 to 2015.
“There was influence from my peers and I saw start-ups from the area which were transforming the world,” he recounts. “In fact, I created something similar to PayPal and was making payments to friends at that time, but I did not think much about it given its small functionality.”
Initially, there was no push factor for Babu to start his own company, as he had a steady job at Oracle for many years. But his inquisitive mind and a knack for problem-solving eventually propelled him to start Zebi.
“I was looking for a big idea that was large enough to start something on my own. With big data and blockchain, it offered enormous opportunities that were big and broad, and in my perspective, that would be less likely to fail,” he explains.
Bringing blockchain into the picture
In late 2015, the Zebi team stumbled upon blockchain, which seemed to offer a solution to the problem they were trying to solve. Babu described his discovery of blockchain as “love at first sight.”
Blockchain is a form of distributed ledger, which is a consensus of replicated, shared and synchronised digital data geographically spread across multiple sites, countries, or institutions, and there is no central administrator or centralised data storage. A peer-to-peer network is required as well as consensus algorithms to ensure replication across nodes is undertaken.
However, at that point in time, most of the blockchain frameworks such as Hyperledger did not exist. One of the things that the Zebi team did was to create their own private blockchain, as they were solving a unique problem of protecting data and making it available for legitimate use.
Even though Zebi is a relatively young startup with just over 20 employees, many of the company’s advisors are alumni from notable tech giants such as Uber, Google, Microsoft, and Intel. Most of them have first or second level connections with Babu, and are passionate about creating totally something new and making a difference to the world.
One of the biggest challenges that Zebi is aiming to tackle in India is to use blockchain technology to ensure secure, seamless, and consent-based exchange of sensitive data, such as land records. Incomplete land titles and disputed land ownerships can last for decades, and various government departments are facing the problem of data being tempered and altered.
To that end, Zebi has currently developed a fully functional product for blockchain-based ledgers for land title data in India. The product, called Zebi Chain, is currently “live” with a Andhra Pradesh state government department called CRDA (Capital Region Development Authority) and being used in Amaravati, the capital region of Andhra Pradesh.
About one lakh (100,000) land records with the CRDA (Capital Regional Development Authority) are now on blockchain, and the data of these records are hosted on the CRDA cloud at Amaravati. Andhra Pradesh is India’s first public entity to use Blockchain-enabled security for land records.
“It took us slightly longer than expected, but I am glad we have are working with a real world customer who is benefitting from our proprietary blockchain product,” Babu shared.
Other than an established partnership with Andhra Prasdesh, Zebi is in advanced talks with the states of Talangana and Maharashtra. It has also received inbound calls from the USA, Bangladesh, Australia, and parts of Africa.
Product offerings to come
Zebi is one of the few companies which has blockchain products being used in a production land records system, not including several prototypes and proof-of-concepts (POCs). Zebi Chain is a proprietary lightweight satellite application installed at a data provider’s premises to provide immutability using Blockchain-based ledger.
The number of nodes in the private Blockchain is configurable and integrates with Ethereum public Blockchain for 100 percent tamper-proof protection. Although Zebi Chain was first designed as a private Blockchain product, it will be ready for integration with a public blockchain by the end of 2018.
“Adaptability to current real world applications and products for clients was a core principle for us — we cannot just create new software from scratch and expect customers to uptake,” Babu explained.
Another core Zebi product, the Zebi Data Gateway, onboards individuals and data requestors with a simple registration process. It facilitates instant data exchange through Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) APIs by connecting to Zebi Chain instances and taking individual consent wherever appropriate.
Currently, Zebi is in the initial R & D stage of developing their own public Blockchain without any dependency on other public Blockchains and it is projected to be ready by 2019.
The future?
Babu hopes that Zebi can achieve two big goals in the long-term. He feels that although there are many existing blockchain companies, it is still early days, much like how Netscape and Yahoo was like in the 1990s during the Internet boom.
He feels that Zebi has the opportunity to become a future Google or Facebook in the blockchain space, and that is the goal that he and his team is working towards.
In the big data space, Babu wants Zebi to become the go-to platform for the communication and exchange of any form of privately-held data that can be kept safe, secure, and temper-proof.
He uses the example of the Equifax case of credit scoring, in which currently the data and application of scoring is centralized:
“Imagine a world where the credit scoring application itself is open — as a young entrepreneur, they have the flexibility to wait and come back with a different algorithm, a different way to create a score and such an application can be created on the Zebi blockchain in the long-term.
Zebi blockchain will provide the data, keep it secure, against tempering and any type of data manipulation. Also, at the same time, make the data available for legitimate use, either directly or through an application.”
Disclaimer: The author owns Bitcoins, Ethereum and alt-coins. Always do your own due diligence when investing into cryptocurrencies.