Covalent: Protocol enforced smart security
Imagine a world where the internet isn't just this blanket use case of insecurity, most people thought in the past that HTTPS was the best way to secure data transfers over the open internet. The fact is what's been discovered in the last few years is that when it came to our private data on the internet it was rarely a bug in the protocol we were using and more that our data was completely handed over to inept and incompetent third parties that handled our data in ways that we ourselves would have been ashamed of. From insecure databases, storing things in plain text, or openly giving our data away to third parties for them to use and then lose thanks to the endless numbers of ways that data has been miss handled in the past when it comes to the internet.
The team at covalent makes our data a first class immutable citizen where the data itself is secured and controlled via policies that we set. If we decide to give our medical history to a website we also get the chance to say only people from X corporation can view this data, and only for Y amount of time. This data privacy and security first platform enforced at the protocol and data level is what makes covalent such a huge shift in how things were thought of in the past. If we don't have to rely and trust third parties to secure our data at every random website we submit information to we suddenly pull the control of our data and our lives back to us.
A perfect example of a way Covalent would be able to improve the current paradigm is not just the internet but in how blockchain as an industry is evolving would be in the AML KYC enforcements happening every day around the blockchain space. With so many people worried about giving random websites their data for identity verification, imagine being able to issue a smart policy enforced identity verification where your data is verifiable by the KYC organization but that you'd know thanks to the underlying smart contract what it could be used for, if it could be shared, and to who it could be shared. The peace of mind of a project that would allow real control and enforcement of who sees our data would be a huge step forward in data privacy that has been needed since the inception of the internet but that we never knew was possible until recently with the advent of smart contract based blockchain technology.
As a fairly new project the covalent team is hard at work putting in place the technology and framework to build what could be the Web 3.0 a smart data based internet that brings back control of our private data into our own hands, allowing us to rest easy that even if on the other end of a website is some random kid with no security knowledge, our data that we submitted will be safe and not misused. The teams got a pretty extensive github wiki that goes over how they intend to wrap our data and allow clean and clear usage based on easy to understand policy language that could be integrated into browsers to offer a true secure and private internet for not just corporations but for everyone that uses it. We will see over the next few months and years if the team will be able to bring the project to market and seek the partnerships required to really see integration, but with the teams private testnet up and running theirs so much potential and NEED for a project like this I'm hopeful that they manage to bring the project to mainstream markets. For more information head over to their website, where you can even signup to take part in their testnet and get a taste for how the blockchain backend will function.
Website: http://www.covalent.ai
Telegram: https://t.me/covalentofficial
Twitter: https://twitter.com/covatoken
Medium: https://medium.com/@covatoken
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Covalent_Official/
Github: https://github.com/covalent-hq/wiki/wiki