Blockchains are transparent by design. This is one of the biggest strengths as well as weaknesses of these decentralized, digital, public ledgers. Transparency means that an immutable record of transactions is accessible to all network participants at all times.
While this transparency creates a high level of trust and verifiability within the network, this comes at the cost of user privacy. Anyone with an internet connection can track and verify transactions, completely exposing one’s data on-chain.
With cybercrimes on the rise, on-chain users are forced to turn to privacy-enhancing tools like mixers or tumblers to keep their personal and financial data confidential. Despite being legitimate users with no ill intent, using these tools comes with the scrutiny of law enforcement.
However, financial privacy is of utmost importance. This fundamental right in crypto means protecting yourself from not just front-running events but also hacks, exploits, and even physical attacks.
In fact, financial confidentiality is necessary for institutional and widespread adoption of blockchain. This means striking a balance between transparency and privacy, which is exactly what the Data Ownership Protocol (DOP) aims to achieve.
Your Crypto, Your Rules: DOP Lets You Decide What the World Sees
DOP protocol is bringing selective transparency to public chains like Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum, and Xlayer. Users decide what they want to keep hidden and what they want to make public. It basically empowers users to curate the information that they wish to share with the world about their holdings and transactions.
With DOP, users get to choose to disclose certain information selectively, and also to whom. This empowers users with control and flexibility over their own data.
The other tech used is ZK-SNARKS, which allows one to prove that they have the secret or data without revealing it.
In DOP, the data provided to the platform is hidden but still used to verify its correctness to ensure user privacy. All verified arguments are kept hashed.
Here, internal accounts are used to provide a single point of reference for each user. So, the internal account’s private key is used for each hash function, but the data stored in it isn’t visible on-chain.
Moreover, DOP encrypts data in transactions to save the information and ensure data ownership.
This financial privacy, however, isn’t at the cost of regulatory compliance. To prevent the platform’s usage by bad actors, DOP provides tools to blacklist illicit activity, in turn, maintaining accountability and ethical standards.
This makes it a powerful gateway to a private, secure, and seamless on-chain experience.
