The DFINITY Foundation announces the open alpha release of DocuTrack

A decentralized document-sharing application (dapp) developed in close collaboration with a Swiss private bank on the Internet Computer Protocol (ICP)

4 min readMar 8, 2024

What is DocuTrack

DocuTrack is an open-source alternative to traditional document-sharing platforms as part of the traditional enterprise IT stack, allowing:

Sending and receiving documents in a fully encrypted format.
Highest security guarantees for communication between businesses and their vendors.
Improved customer onboarding (KYC and AML), signature collections, and user experience for enterprises.

This use case highlights how dapps on the Internet Computer can serve traditional financial institutions and help enterprise evolve their technology stack to be more private by default. Users’ data on DocuTrack never leaves the browser in plaintext. It’s encrypted while in transit and processed through nodes that execute transactions through chain-key cryptography. It utilizes ICP’s threshold security scheme — always verifiable by anyone while being directly accessible to authorized parties only.

Why Blockchain

The idea for DocuTrack was born through the Zurich-based bank’s frustration and ongoing challenges with document sharing and some privacy concerns regarding data security and sensitive communications with their clients and vendors.

Leveraging the Internet Computer blockchain, they and other enterprises can now access a novel piece of infrastructure to share documents and collect signatures in an encrypted, fully decentralized fashion. ICP’s decentralized nature guarantees data is stored and continually validated by nodes, supporting the integrity and security of the user’s data.

This set of features is crucial for all enterprises, especially for financial institutions dealing with privacy-sensitive customers, legal firms, and other parties who need to access files and sign private documents. Beyond its security guarantees, DocuTrack also improves a financial institution’s user and vendor relationship experience — allowing their clients to complete onboarding processes more easily.

How DocuTrack works

Using DocuTrack is straightforward — through a web browser, anyone with internet access can upload a file from their device and set it as protected by a secret key. The sender can then set a specific recipient that could access and decrypt the file’s secret key to access it without providing any personal information such as email address, password, or location, and be exposed to any centralized privacy concerns.

DocuTrack is open for all, also allowing users without an Internet Identity to start sharing files with registered users through a file-sharing request initiated by the recipient. DocuTrack already demonstrates the value of this feature — allowing its POC partner (Swiss Private bank) to collect sensitive client information and signatures as part of its ongoing banking service seamlessly.

DocuTrack’s backend leverages cryptography to encrypt file sharing through four stages:

Key generation: The sender and receiver agree on a secret key, kept encrypted during the interaction.
Encryption: the sender uses the secret key to encrypt the data, which becomes ciphertext.
Transmission: The receiver accepts the encrypted data over a secure channel.
Decryption: the receiver uses the same secret key to decrypt the ciphertext and restore the original data.

It’s still day 1 for Enterprise Blockchain

With most of the enterprise IT stack still relying on legacy infrastructure and operating through centralized systems — the launch of DocuTrack sets an important milestone in the era of the IT stack’s migration to the blockchain.

This trend has been on the rise over the past year with increased interest from enterprise businesses exploring how blockchain can improve processes and the challenges they face. ICP’s growing compute performance over the past few months has also been an important factor — now supporting many more use cases for cloud applications that have been sitting on legacy cloud infrastructure.

GDPR-compliant out of the box

DocuTrack can be configured to be GDPR compliant straight out of the box through ICP’s EU subnet — allowing a fully regulated service despite sitting on a privacy-preserving blockchain architecture.

As a native decentralized app, sitting directly on ICP — businesses and everyday users can now migrate from services like Dropbox and DocuSign to send and receive files more securely through DocuTrack without being subject to any regulatory risks.

Conclusion

DocuTrack’s open alpha sets a new standard for handling documents and client communication inside financial institutions and beyond. DFINITY is excited to continue building a more decentralized world, where privacy and security are resolute and guaranteed. Launching DocuTrack as open-source software from day 1 means anyone can already iterate on white-label solutions and add new features to the platform.

As part of its committed efforts to ICP and a decentralized future, the foundation will continue improving DocuTrack and also build more tools that accelerate the adoption of blockchain technology in the enterprise world. If you’re interested in using DocuTrack or learning more about building SaaS applications on the Internet Computer, please refer to DocuTrack’s GitHub or start using it for yourself here.

Read the announcement on CoinDesk

Learn more about the Internet Computer