Introducing Parcel Beta

The Parcel SDK is now live!

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Oasis Labs was founded with a vision of making better privacy available to everyone. That started with building a new class of technologies able to protect our most sensitive data, while still giving us access to the apps we love and use every day. Modern developers need tools that can keep up with their workstreams — nimble API solutions that provide outsized value and little integration cost. The Parcel SDK was developed to bridge the gap between these powerful (yet complex) privacy solutions and the everyday app developer.

Today, we’re excited to announce the Parcel is live in our inaugural Beta release. With this launch you can get access to all of Parcel Beta’s features, allowing you to automatically implement data ownership and access policies for your users, analyze data in a privacy-preserving environment, and unlock data that was previously too regulated or risky to use.

Meet Parcel

At its core, Parcel is a privacy-first data governance SDK equipped with powerful privacy tools designed to protect and control access to your data. It distills years of privacy research and expertise into an easy-to-use SDK. The interface is designed specifically for developers looking to expand their app’s capabilities to include powerful data privacy and governance features. With the release of Parcel Beta, you’ll get access to the following features:

• An attribute based access control framework that allows you to configure policies for datasets. Policies can be defined using a simple conditional logic language, and can reference a diverse set of attributes such as users, time, or even developer-defined tags.
• A built-in compute job dispatcher, which makes it easy to spin up an isolated environment for privacy preserving computation. With access to cutting-edge secure enclave technology, data can remain confidential and protected at every stage of the lifecycle.
• Data ownership features that allow your users to control how their data is used, opt-in and out of policies they configure, and even delegate control of their data to a third party.
• An easy-to-use account management tool that allows you to use Parcel for authentication within your app.
• A tamper-proof audit trail backed by an immutable ledger. Parcel’s sophisticated set of logs allows users to see details about how their data was accessed and what compute is done within the scope of their policies.

If you’d like to try Parcel get started with our quick start guide here. We also encourage everyone to join our community Slack channel and follow the #parcel-support channel. Here you can meet with other community members, ask our team questions, and get the latest updates on Oasis Parcel.

Parcel in Action

Parcel’s approach to general purpose data governance and confidential compute allows it to be used for a broad set of application types. From larger enterprises to nimble starts, we see Parcel being used by our customers in a few unique ways:

• In their product: Provide data sharing & marketplace features in their product and allow their customers to manage and control their data. Backed by an immutable ledger, the Parcel SDK is your one-stop shop for easily integrating your app with the Oasis Network.
• With their teams: Set access controls and run analysis on internal datasets across teams and roles. Easily track how data is used, and secure your most sensitive and valuable data in a Parcel-powered vault.
• With their partners: Share data with partners and unlock new business opportunities with limited risk and tight control. Track usage across each partner, and easily organize consortiums to pool data — unlocking new insights and industry-wide value.

Here are examples of how a few of our customers leverage Parcel to improve their product stack and offer stronger privacy guarantees to their users.

The Music Fund: To make funding decisions, The Music Fund uses data from artists as input to our streaming revenue forecasting algorithm. They believe that the data belongs to the artist and that the artist should control access and see when their data is used. To achieve that goal, Music Fund used the Oasis Parcel SDK to easily and securely store artist credentials on the Oasis privacy-preserving blockchain. They see the initial use case as just the beginning and are excited about building an artist privacy-preserving data-sharing platform on top of the Parcel SDK.

Hu.Man.AI: Hu.man.ai aims to benefit individual human lives by retaining memories so they can be effortlessly recalled when needed. Memories and thoughts worth remembering further define our lives and are among our most valuable gifts in life. All humans should be able to safeguard the thoughts and memories they value with a Personal AI that Never Forgets. At Hu.man.ai, they are building an AI from individual experiences, that is private to the individual alone, and secured with the best technologies available.

Nebula Genomics: Nebula was founded on the principles of delivering a privacy-first genetic test to market, and now they’re taking things one step further, enabling users to retain control of their genome at all times. Using Parcel, Nebula customers can retain full control over their genomic data and keep it private from Nebula, even while their genome is being analyzed. Sign up today and sequence your genome with the most accurate DNA test powered by Parcel.

CryptoSafe Alliance: Crypto theft and attacks are on the rise, and exchanges need a platform to identify and ban bad actors. The CryptoSafe Platform was developed to allow exchanges to share threat intelligence data. Because the platform leverages Parcel and its confidential compute capabilities, exchange data is kept confidential even while it’s being compared.

Castalise: Castalise is a data marketplace with privacy at its core. They help data scientists and enterprises monetize and derive value from data assets with minimal risk exposure. Users across different industry verticals and various use-cases can maintain full control, ownership, and governance over their data while securely collaborating internally (cross-department or cross-jurisdiction) or externally (with different data owners or data consumers). With private AI, powered by blockchain and different privacy-preserving technologies, Castalise aims to help transition from a world of Big Data riddled with risks to a world of Open Data enabled by secure collaboration.

Ruyi Health: At Ruyi Health, their mission is to create a secure, intuitive, and intelligent health platform that empowers their users to live healthy lives. One way they do this is by making it easy for users to keep track of their sensitive health data and share it with their doctors. The Parcel SDK allows Ruyi Health to easily adopt excellent security measures so that users’ sensitive health data is accessible to them and shared with their doctors, but protected from data breaches.

PrivGuard: We used Parcel to help us build PrivGuard, our research project aimed at helping users take control of their data. PrivGuard lets you specify privacy policies and automatically enforce them when you allow someone to access your data. Parcel helps us store and encrypt all of our data, in addition to providing a platform where we can perform secure computation.

Get involved

If you’d like to get started building check out our documentation here, or if you have questions join our Slack here and follow the #parcel-support channel.

Parcel Beta is just the beginning. The controls and tools provided by Parcel are necessary primitives for unlocking a powerful digital ownership economy. Through this economy we hope to enable use cases for the tokenization and exchange of digital assets, unlocking new value and opportunities for individuals and businesses alike. As we march towards the GA release of Parcel we encourage you to test out the SDK, send us feedback, and helps us build a new generation of privacy-first applications.