What is privEOS and what can I do with it?

Applications building on top of public blockchains all face the same issue: Since everything on a blockchain is public, apps cannot collect any personal information from their customers without exposing all their information publicly. This might not be so much of a problem if you are building a gambling application. But if you're building anything more serious, you're likely gonna run into the problem of how to deal with personal information. Regulations like the european GDPR have made it very difficult or even impossible to build decentralised applications without something like privEOS.

With privEOS, apps can store their private customer data in a decentralised way. They will also be able to control via a smart contract who gets access to the data, under which conditions, and when. The conditions under which a user gets read-access to a piece of data are freely programmable by the app. Depending on how the rules for data access are laid out by the app, the user can stay in control of their data.

You build your smart contract based app just as you normally would. But now, thanks to privEOS, your app can start collecting personal data from your customers in a GDPR compliant way. This opens the doors to a whole class of decentralised applications that couldn't have been built on public blockchains before!

Additionally, you can use smart contract logic to control read-access to that data, which enables yet another class of applications to be built. You can implement dead-man switches, time based locks for data, multisig data delegation, and many other things that can be done with smart contracts.

Due to the use of blockchain for giving read-access, access logs can be proven to not having been tampered with. For the demonstration of a data marketplace example application that we have built on privEOS, see our demo video below.