Datawallet Roadmap: Our Journey To A New Data Ecosystem

Datawallet
Datawallet Blog
Published in
14 min readMay 10, 2019

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Many of you asked us for an updated roadmap and more information on what’s to come. This is the important post about our roadmap and exciting future of Datawallet. We hope you take the time to read this update carefully. If you’re already familiar with Datawallet, you can skip the introduction and jump straight to the next section.

Introduction to Datawallet

At Datawallet, we believe that your digital identity is something you should have complete control over. Owning your digital identity means owning your data, and that’s exactly what your Datawallet empowers you to do. Datawallet’s mission is to give people complete ownership of their data without any interference from outside organizations.

Over the last eleven years, tremendous amounts of energy and money have been poured into blockchain technology. From cheers to tears, enthusiasts, entrepreneurs, and investors have tried their hand at the blockchain wheel of fortune. Blockchain is about more than tokens for ICOs, current market rates, or fiat credits for payments. Blockchain is the result of decades and generations of evolution that have come before. From basic encryption of messages to the proof-of-secrets of public key cryptography, it’s because of these earlier and subsequent innovations that digital sovereignty is now fully possible. From tools for collection, managing, and curating data, to privacy protected marketplaces for data exchange and secure analysis of data, the Datawallet is the new standard for Web3 and blockchain.

The resulting system has the potential to support the next generation of personal data products and AI-based customer experiences, finally allowing all Internet users to make their data work for them.

Datawallet provides a self-sovereign wallet that puts you in charge of your data. One of our key concepts is privacy. With fine-grained permissioning control over your data, you decide if you want to share your information and if so who you want to share it with. Datawallet also provides a C2B Exchange where you can monetize your data. From data privacy and mobility to insights and monetization, now you own your data, and this offers endless possibilities.

In the coming weeks, we’ll share more information about our development progress and some personal stories about why we build. In this post, we revisit our roadmap and give you a concrete look at Datawallet’s plans and opportunities. We’re also relaunching our Blockchain and Development website with a snazzy new look, sections for our developer outreach, a launch checklist, our updated roadmap, and more. With that, let’s jump into our plans and processes for the near future and for years to come. A future that provides everyone with a Datawallet.

Revisiting Datawallet’s Initial Phase 1 Roadmap

Back in February 2018 we published our first public roadmap, giving our best effort to lay out the technological development needed. In the roadmap, we focused mainly on the modularity of the Datawallet Ecosystem, as described in our initial whitepaper. We also tried to examine the potential challenges and assumptions that were made, as it’s impossible to predict the future with these new and rapidly evolving high technologies. In the last year, significant strides have been made by the talented people and projects in this space, opening up new avenues of opportunity.

Throughout, our vision has stayed the same: enabling true data ownership, creating the world’s first decentralized individual data marketplace, and creating the new data layer of the next internet.

To paraphrase our previous roadmap post:

“Based upon the demand faced in the market from, both, enterprise customers and the community, the continued development of the components may prioritize a different sequence for each component. In fact, we are optimistic that active engagement with the permissioned data ecosystem will reveal use-cases and demand we have not fully considered that will prioritize components with novel functionality…”

“In conclusion, we are striving to make an end-to-end permissioned data exchange in which members can choose the components that best fit their needs from a range of implementations developed, both, internally at Datawallet and in the broader community. We are hard at work developing and distributing the first implementation of the necessary and sufficient components to provide our data providers value.”

Since then, we’ve been researching and building the tools needed to make our vision a reality, as well as expanding our partners in this new data ecosystem. From our whitepaper being honored by one of the largest scientific organizations in the world, to blockchain partnerships such as Enigma, to writing about the personal data world more frequently, we’ve been hard at work. We’ve also moved into a new office in Berlin last year, increasing our development team there and we recently published a longer post on all the experimentation and development done on the blockchain. At the beginning of the year, we launched a user contest in the US with the goal of stress testing our new data pipelines and data flows, which favored admirably. This has been a major building block for us.

Additionally, we’ve seen a lot of changes on the data side of our business. The many scandals, new regulations (such as GDPR and now CCPA) and public interest on the topic, has forced large corporations to take a renewed look at their data practices. Meanwhile, companies making a living on people’s data have been working to protect their advantage. We first had to overcome the ways these incumbents are protecting their advantage, while working on our data pipelines and ETLs that allow the user to move their data into their Datawallet. Companies under GDPR need to allow anyone to download their personal data, the “right to data portability”, and this data needs to be “in a structured, commonly used and machine-readable format”. However, it quickly became apparent that companies would scramble the data in the files, use different file formats, and other tactics to make it as difficult as possible for anyone to do anything useful with their data. To combat this, we needed to develop a robust set of proprietary data engineering tech to make the process for data owners as seamless as possible.

Evidently, there have been lots of challenges and obstacles along the road for us, yet, most of them turned out to be positive, and sometimes even vital, developments. When we devised our initial public roadmap, we anticipated some of the cultural and technological challenges, albeit with the increased interest of large corporations to take a leading role in data compliance. However, we underestimated the level of interest by those corporations and the needs they have to stay ahead of the increasingly strict data regulations. Working alongside these companies on some of the fundamental modules of the Datawallet ecosystem has taken precedence for us.

In our Phase 1 roadmap you can see our processes and building blocks that made up our development goals. This included items like the mentioned ETL pipelines, lots of backend architecture changes, developing the smart contract based data exchange contract in Solidity, and much more. The only item we did not cross of the list was the release of our user-facing application. The reason for this was the adjustments in our business model and work with companies, that were required to provide sufficient liquidity in the data marketplace, so we could solve the marketplace-typical chicken & egg problem.

Working with these large corporations, we realized we had to adjust some of our initial ideas and focus on certain aspects of the modules. By building long-term infrastructure with a clear and proven product market fit on the enterprise side, we are able to scale much faster, while creating a simpler integration.

With that, we needed to make a decision on our technology stack. We could either release Datawallet on the Ethereum mainnet, despite the scaling limitations, or delay a mainnet release to ensure the ecosystem as a whole — with all its partners, use cases and network usage — would work. Given the frequency with which data is used, paying around $7 cents or more for each transaction is of course not feasible. Given the interest from companies and our mission, this was a straightforward, if not easy, decision to make.

For this reason, we adjusted our timelines and focused on working with our partners to create a lasting infrastructure. Most importantly, we will keep a strong focus on acquiring and onboarding new launch partners between now and a mainnet launch — stay tuned for more news on this front. We do want to emphasize, that the reason for the adjustment and extension is to focus on creating a fully functional end-to-end data ecosystem with multiple partners and more advanced functionality than originally planned. This pertains especially to our security and data permissioning, which is of particular importance to our business partners. We believe this is the best course of action, benefitting both the short term and long term success of the Datawallet ecosystem.

Below we outline our immediate priorities on the development front, what’s to come further down the line, as well as a brief FAQ addressing the most important questions in an easily digestible way.

Current Development Priorities

Currently, there are three main things that the Datawallet team is working on:

Datawallet with on-chain acquisition flow on Testnet V1.0

The first thing we will release is our Ethereum Testnet V1.0, including the Datawallet Blockchain Explorer and the actual Datawallet itself. This first version of Datawallet with on-chain data acquisition flow will allow users to store and manage their digital keys and data in a local and secure environment, their own Datawallet. The release includes a browser extension, in which both keys and data are securely stored, and an app store for apps users can choose to power with their own data. Alongside the Datawallet, we will release our Ethereum testnet V1.0, which will facilitate fully disintermediated, consent-based data permissioning, enable new personal data products, and allow iterative development towards a mainnet.

We will also release a technical post comparing this release to what we laid out in the initial Datawallet whitepaper. We were able to achieve most of the core features, proving that the envisioned data ecosystem is possible and, while not easy, achievable. We will continuously improve on this major release over the coming months.

Then we are also releasing our Developer SDK and API. The Datawallet SDK provides an intuitive and documented flow for querying data in a fully user permissioned way. Exposing a familiar GraphQL interface and a unified flow across devices that users will understand, developers can start writing queries today and building applications tomorrow. This means any developer can build applications that utilize the incredible data asset in the users’ Datawallet in an ethical and secure way.

Cosmos

At the same time, part of our Blockchain team has started their initial research and development on Cosmos. We will explain the reasoning behind choosing Cosmos as an alternative option for Datawallet below and in the future development section below, we will also be releasing dedicated content around this topic in the next coming weeks. With the global data market growing exponentially, finding a platform that could offer interoperability of blockchains and scalability to realize a fully decentralized and ownership-assuring data ecosystem was an essential step.

Cosmos is an ecosystem of blockchains that can scale and interoperate with each other. Until now, most blockchains are siloed and unable to communicate with each other. They were hard to build and could only handle a small amount of transactions per second. Cosmos (and other projects like Polkadot) aim to solve these problems with a new technical vision. This is a big topic in itself, but the core challenges Cosmos addresses are: (1) scalability, i.e. applications built on top of Ethereum are inhibited by a shared rate of 15 transactions per second allowed by the Proof-of-Work consensus mechanism; (2) usability, i.e. the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) needs to accommodate all use cases, therefore, limiting flexibility for developers; and (3) sovereignty.

On both the Ethereum testnet development and general Datawallet, as well as our Cosmos development, we will provide regular updates on our blog, video walkthroughs, and more. Our aim is to be more transparent about the day-to-day work of the Datawallet team, showing more of the process and work than just focusing on hard dates and abstract deliverables. We hope that this allows for more collaboration and trust on both our blockchain community and developer side.

We also want to state here, that building on top of Cosmos will further substantiate the vital role of the ERC-20 DXT token with significantly increased throughput and lower transaction costs, leading to higher adoption feasibility. There are multiple solutions already should we switch to Cosmos completely, such as creating a Peg-Zone between Ethereum and the Cosmos Blockchain (more on that in the Looking Beyond) section. Generally, Ethereum and Cosmos are also close and possibly soon compatible, as Blockchains that use fast-finality consensus algorithms can connect with Cosmos by adapting their Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) protocol. For example, if Ethereum were to switch to Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget), a direct connection could be established between it and the Cosmos Ecosystem by adapting IBC to work with Casper.

B2C Partners

With our partners, the core focus has been the fully compliant permissioning of user data and the secure storage of that data, as already touched upon earlier in this post. Forward-thinking companies want to take a leadership position on issues surrounding user data, and we’re helping them do that. Datawallet provides the perfect solution, with clear-cut permissioning stored in an immutable blockchain, and a digital wallet that enables trustless data sharing with compliance and security as core tenants. We have been hard at work to facilitate those needs and will share more on this solution soon.

Looking Beyond

Our biggest long-term goal is a truly decentralized, autonomous, multi-ledger asset exchange operating as an independent DApp with its own blockchain and DXT as the singular value measure, underlying the decentralized Exchange (DEX).

This is an ambitious vision, and while we are working on finalizing Phase I of our roadmap, we are concurrently spending a lot of time and effort on researching the technologies needed to make the data DEX a reality.

As described above, we decided on Cosmos and their tech-stack to facilitate our vision, in order to realize interoperability of blockchains and scalability on their platform. To further explain why we are building on Cosmos, you can take a look at their website where they do an excellent job of walking you through what Cosmos is, how their consensus mechanism work and notable alumni who are already stress-testing with it, such as Binance.

Most notably, it allows us to build the Data DEX, and enables mass scalability, which is needed for compliance from our business partners. If you think about the scale that many global enterprises have and the massive amounts of transactions needed to permission data, being able to build Application Specific Blockchains (ASIBs) and connecting them to other chains is an extremely competitive advantage.

Lots of the core features were already communicated on a high level in our original roadmap and achieved in Phase I. As we noted, some of the development work for the future has been moved to the present. Some remains for future releases of our network. In either case, our research and development work continues to move at an energetic pace and is going hand in hand with our business development and sales efforts.

FAQs:

Is mainnet coming in Q2 or Q3? No. Launching on mainnet means Datawallet would fully run on the Ethereum blockchain. While this would seem like a milestone, it would significantly limit Datawallet’s functionality and DXT use within the ecosystem, and currently, make it impractical for our business partners. Thus, there is no good reason for us to launch on mainnet hastily. Developing in the fast-moving blockchain space, as well as the ever-growing data ecosystem is risky, especially giving the sensitive data at hand and the unforgiving nature of smart contracts. We have therefore made the prudent decision to prioritize long-term growth and avoid unnecessary short-term risks. In the meantime, we’re launching the Datawallet platform on our improving testnet and continuing to work actively with our partners.

If you do not launch mainnet now, will I still be able to withdraw previously earned DXT? In our previously released Alpha App, users were able to earn DXT by permissioning their data to our internal data exchange “DX Research”. We utilized this data exchange to continue building the platform, examine the quality of data from APIs and improve our backend architecture to handle the heavy-duty data tasks. With our mainnet release pushed back, we are working on an alternative way to withdraw the DXT you’ve earned (in the testnet, the DXT and ETH are freely available and mirror the live versions). We kindly ask that you give us a few weeks to find a good solution that will make it easy and secure to withdraw your previously earned DXT.

With you developing on Cosmos, does this mean you will do a token swap or stop supporting the ERC-20 DXT token? As stated in the section on our current development, we are fully supporting DXT and it’s the integral utility in the ecosystem (which you can find out more about in the section on future development). There are multiple solutions should we switch to Cosmos completely, such as pegging the value. Ethereum and Cosmos will possibly soon be compatible as Blockchains that use fast-finality consensus algorithms can connect with Cosmos by adapting their Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) protocol. For example, if Ethereum were to switch to Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget), a direct connection could be established between it and the Cosmos Ecosystem by adapting IBC to work with Casper. Currently, it is already possible to connect the Proof-of-Work Ethereum blockchain with Cosmos, and thus the ERC-20 token, with something called a “Peg-Zone”. A Peg-Zone is a blockchain that tracks the state of another blockchain. The Peg-Zone itself has fast-finality and is therefore compatible with IBC. Its role is to establish finality for the blockchain it bridges. So no matter the option, we are not leaving our ERC-20 token behind!

So, with all these questions that we’ve already heard out of the way, let’s take a look at how you can stay up to date and how we want to communicate our progress and show you more from inside Datawallet.

Communication

With these exciting developments ahead, we wanted to use this opportunity to share a bit more about how we want to communicate our progress.

Being strictly in “buidl” mode over the past few months, we’ve been keeping our heads down developing. One of the first things we’ll do is bring back regular updates, as well as relaunching the Datawallet Community Page. To showcase the incredible team that is working hard at Datawallet, we’re planning to share more behind-the-scenes content, i.e. videos, pictures and the like.

Our main communication channels will be:

  • Our blog where we’ll share most content, press releases and important updates
  • We’ll share all announcements and major news on Twitter and our Telegram Announcements Channel
  • Our Reddit is where we’ll host Q&As and generally interact
  • Currently, the most direct line to communicate with the team is our Telegram Group, however, we are looking into alternatives such as discord or Slack. This would allow us to delineate different conversational topics and leave spam heavy Telegram
  • We’ll also share more video content, as described earlier in this post as well, on the Datawallet YouTube Channel
  • The Datawallet support is reachable via support@datawallet.com

Lastly, we’ll be sharing important updates via our email list, so make sure to subscribe via our blockchain website for related updates. Make sure you stay subscribed or subscribe to the above mentioned channels to be the first to hear from us.

Please feel free to reach out to us, ask questions, share feedback and generally discuss everything in our Telegram Group. The team will try to answer everything as quickly as possible.

We look forward to the discussions and want to thank you for the support as we build this new, decentralized data ecosystem.

Team Datawallet

Sign up to our waitlist today on www.datawallet.com to be amongst the first on the new platform, or follow our socials to stay up to date on all things Datawallet.

Feel free to subscribe to our Telegram Daily Channel for the most important news or drop the team a note in our official Datawallet Telegram Chat.

You can follow Datawallet on Twitter // Medium // Reddit // Youtube

Datawallet Your Data is Yours. Own It.

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Datawallet
Datawallet Blog

Datawallet gives you all the tools you need to easily comply with today’s and tomorrow’s data regulations. Visit our website: https://datawallet.com