Millions traded personal data for convenient services without much thought. Cambridge Analytica's breach exposed what people didn't realize they were giving up. The harvesting of 50 million Facebook
Millions traded personal data for convenient services without much thought. Cambridge Analytica's breach exposed what people didn't realize they were giving up.
The harvesting of 50 million Facebook profiles sparked a global reckoning. Europe responded with GDPR earlier this year. California passed the Consumer Privacy Act to protect 40 million state residents.
These regulations address part of the problem. But they're not the whole answer. GXChain, a public blockchain platform, takes a different approach. Instead of relying on regulation, the company built technology that puts control back in users' hands.
Users maintain a private key that guards their personal information. When they want to share data, they authorize it explicitly. In exchange, they earn GXS tokens. The more they share, the more tokens they accumulate.
The company deployed this model through Blockcity, a mobile app that rewards users for building valuable data profiles. Yunpeng Ding, GXChain's regional manager for North America, said: "As of July 2018, there are more than 1.86 million registered users in Blockcity, compared to the population of the whole crypto world. This is a really huge proportion. Not to mention 40% of them are daily active users."
When users sign up for Blockcity, they establish what the company calls a G-ID, a universal digital identity tied to government-issued documents. This links their online activity to their offline identity while keeping their data encrypted. The platform stores everything on IPFS, a distributed file system.
GXChain envisions Blockcity expanding beyond data management. Eventually, the app could handle transactions, social interactions, and commerce. That expansion would tap into the GXB Decentralized Data Exchange, which runs on the GXChain blockchain.
The exchange works peer-to-peer. Buyers and sellers transact directly, with asymmetric encryption preventing any third party from accessing the data. According to the company's white paper, this breaks what traditional exchanges call "data stagnation" - the problem of valuable information sitting unused.
The platform has accumulated significant activity. Over 3,000 projects have applied to build on GXChain. Another 100 are in incubation. More than 20 have gone live, including Blockcity, DES, CoinGet, Prophet, Unitopia, WanLiMa, YuBiBao, LendChain, Lucia, and DAMO.
Last month, China's Ministry of Industry and Information ranked GXChain fourth among 31 public blockchains based on three criteria: technology, applications, and innovation.
