How Profila Uses Cardano to Give You Control Over Your Personal Data
Find out how Profila uses the Cardano blockchain to combat the issues of privacy, security, and transparency online.
🔵 Profila gives you control over the use of your personal data, compensates you for watching paid ads (if you opt in), and helps you combat misuse of your data by organizations on the internet.
🔵 Many of Profila’s crucial functionalities are integrated with the Cardano blockchain. It has already received funding from the Cardano community as part of Project Catalyst (biggest fund for ADA owners).
🔵 Profila is getting ready to launch its Cardano-native Zero Knowledge Token, sale of which will take place in Q1 of 2022
Intro — what problems does Profila solve?
The more you use the web and apps on all of your devices, the more your personal data grows. This is because each of your digital activities is tracked and recorded. Each time you…
☑️ visit a website
☑️ watch a video
☑️ like a post on social media
☑️ fill out a form or buy a product or service online
… personal data about you is collected and shared with brands that will use it to advertise to you about their own products and services. They decide which channel to use and how frequently you will receive their messages.
Essentially, you have no control over your personal data or how it is used.
That is largely because you — like many others using online services today — lack the tools to give brands clear instructions about how much they can interact with you, which channel they can use, and which content you want to see from them.
This is why we created Profila - to level the playing field and bring people like you on the same level of technical maturity as the biggest brands, making this exchange of information consumer-consenting, and two-directional.
How does Profila work?
Profila works as a web app, but is in essence a new data, customer engagement, and marketing platform. We designed it so that you can easily control who uses your data and for what purposes.
It’s a tool to help you communicate with the brands in your life so they can get to know you better, and provide you with a better service that is more personalized, accurate and ethical.
We have been building our platform since 2019 and today we have a mobile app in Apple Store and Google Play that is fully functional. The access to it is based on an invitation code that will come either from businesses that are on our platform and invite their customers, or from us to the investors in our ZEKE token, after the public round.
If you accept to connect to a brand, you can determine the cadence of your relationship. You can:
➡️ allow them access to certain parts of your data,
➡️ tell them how frequently they can contact you,
➡️ via which channel.
Interact with Brands on your terms
Via the Profila platform, you will be able to decide how brands can engage with you and regulate all the information they send to you.
If you do not want to hear anything anymore from a specific company, or if a company uses your personal data in a way that goes against your expectations, you can use the privacy rights in the app to tell them to delete your information or to stop sending you marketing messages.
This feature has all GDPR data subject rights baked into it, allowing you to tell a brand what to do in an easy 3-click process (e.g. delete all personal data they have about you).
Get compensated in return
If a company sends you commercial content (like an ad for which they normally pay Facebook or Google), you get 50 percent of the ad budget the brand pays. We provide you with the tools to control the use of you data and get better value from their data.
This is why we say:
“People are our partners, and Brands are our customers”
How and why we use Cardano
Often referred to as a “third-generation blockchain”, Cardano provides an efficient alternative to the standard proof of work (POW) networks, by introducing proof of stake (POS) to validate transactions.
Before we discuss our choice of Cardano, we want to clarify that Profila today is a centralized application that has decentralized functionalities. This means that the entire mobile application is not in full running on the Cardano blockchain (as a full DApp), but instead largely on Microsoft Azure.
However, many of the crucial functionalities in the Profila mobile application for controlling and sharing of data are integrated (or currently being integrated) with the Cardano blockchain.
We are currently working on several use cases built on the Cardano blockchain because we believe in its enormous potential. Here are the main reasons why it fits into our solution:
More scalable and sustainable
Cardano solves specific scalability and sustainability issues inherent to first and second-generation blockchain such as Bitcoin or Ethereum, as proof of stake systems minimizes the energy needed to facilitate a blockchain system.
Private, secure and transparent
Each time a piece of data is shared, or each time you tell a company how to use (or not use) your data, your instruction hereto is hashed (meaning encrypted) and saved on the Cardano blockchain.
This way, you have immutable proof of what happened, including the terms under which you shared data.
In case a brand misuses your info, shares it with other parties, keeps it longer than agreed, or uses it for other purposes than included in that initial agreement, you have black/white immutable proof of what happened.
Community support
The community support we have received so far is one of the main reasons why we work with Cardano. 10 of our Cardano-integration projects have already received funding from the Cardano community as part of the decentralized venture capital fund called Project Catalyst, which is administered by the community.
Less costs for transactions
As a third-generation blockchain, it is less expensive to transact on Cardano than other chains. This allows it to scale globally with minimum energy consumption, solving one of the biggest issues in the current blockchain ecosystem. The costs involved in a transaction depend on the size of individual transactions. However, the average costs are generally more friendly than Ethereum.
Fast processing
It is capable of processing over 1.000 transactions every second (TPS), proving faster than Ethereum, which supports only 20 transactions per second for now. In the future, the Cardano network could potentially support 1 million TPS (pending an upgrade to the blockchain platform called Hydra).
We believe the Cardano blockchain is best suited for Profila’s low-value and high-volume transactions.
On Profila, you get compensated for granting access to your data (50/50) and you receive 50% of the advertising spend when you opt-in for paid content from brands (unlike platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, where only the platform gets paid by brands to deliver you ads).
Because Profila pays out people for viewing ads, we will have millions of transactions per day, all of a low value. The price of an ad can range from cents to a couple of EUR, but rarely higher. Cardano will allow us to effectively deploy our ad-delivery model on the blockchain.
Our Cardano projects in the future
One important part of our roadmap is our integration into the Cardano blockchain for crucial privacy and data sharing features, in addition to the integration of Cardano’s decentralized ID solution called Atala Prism. We have recently received funding for this project and are now scoping the technical requirements with IOHK, the commercial company behind Cardano.
👉We also explain previously funded proposals in more detail here:
About Zero Knowledge Advertising & our token
We are building out one of the most crucial solutions in our platform, which is a privacy-preserving, alternative AdTech solution called Zero Knowledge Advertising (ZKA).
With ZKA, we are building a replacement for third-party cookies, where we can still guarantee personalized advertising delivery without the need to share an individual’s personal data with the advertiser.
You can read more about how it all works here:
Related to ZKA, we are also launching our Zero Knowledge Token (ZEKE). It is a Cardano-native token which will be used as a reward instrument to increase the user base and incentivize people to learn how to work with key (privacy) features that form part of this new AdTech ecosystem.
ZEKE will also be used as a payment instrument to compensate people who opt-in to receiving ads. Via the Profila app, you can opt-in to view (anonymized or consented) personalized brand content for which brands pay a part of their advertising budget.
Learn more about our Zero Knowledge Token here: https://profila.com/zeke
About the Profila team
The concept of Profila came from Shawn Jensen, South African born who lives in Switzerland.
Shawn and me (Michiel Van Roey) met in Geneva in October 2017 after being linked on AngelList. I was working for the European Center for Nuclear Research in Switzerland and Shawn was looking for a co-founder with experience in legal and privacy.
Shawn and I started working together quickly thereafter and were joined by Profila’s current Chief Product Officer, Luke Bragg. Us three are considered the co-founders and have been working for almost 4 years together. Shawn is from South Africa, and Luke is from the US, both living in Switzerland. I am from Belgium and living in Brussels.
The Profila team today counts over 20 people in different roles and levels of engagement.
There is of course the core team of 10 people, from 10 different nationalities, and cover legal, product, marketing, technology, operations etc. But we also have 5 full time developers working under our CTO, several sales people, and a board of 5 experienced advisors with relevant experience in the crypto, AdTech, and privacy space.
We were recently also joined by 5 community managers, from the US, Ireland, Nigeria, Pakistan, India, who are responsible for engaging with and responding to our community 24/7.
Sign up to buy our Zero Knowledge Token
The ZEKE public sale is coming to MinSWAP minswap.org as a LBE “Liquidity Bootstrapping Event” in May 2024, where 10% of our token supply will be offered for sale (LBE) and as rewards (farming). In addition, Profila will launch its ISPO or initial stakepool offering.
We have created 500.000.000 ZEKE on 22 November 2021 (“referred to as the ZEKE Creation Date in our Whitepaper”), which will be distributed as follows:
- a maximum of 22% will be offered to the public (10% in the Pre-Seed and Seed round, 10% in the LBE round (LBE/farming) and 2% in the ISPO),
- 35% will be allocated to a user incentive pool which will incentivize Profila users for certain activities on the platform and within the ecosystem,
- 15% will be allocated to the team and existing shareholders,
- 8% will be reserved for service providers and advisors,
- 20% will be allocated for future marketing and development activities.
The price of 1 ZEKE will be:
- $0.022 during the Pre-Seed Round
- $0.030 during the Seed Round
- $0.075* during the Public Round
Whereas the Pre-seed round is closed, the Seed is open until the LBE event on Minswap minswap.org in May 2024.
If you are interested to take part , you can already join our newsletter and whitelist here.
