by Martin Schäffner | 15 October 2020 | Blockchain
Why do we sign a contract or a bill? In our everyday life, signatures are often used as a handwritten mark to make proof of identity and intent. In public blockchain networks, participants cannot necessarily trust each other. Everyone can potentially claim to be the owner of a blockchain address and initiate a token transfer. Further, even if the message is from the owner of a blockchain address, corrupt nodes can manipulate the content, e.g. changing the beneficiary to their benefit. That’s why we need digital signatures, which allow confirming the authenticity and integrity of a message.
In this slideshow, you will learn about what digital signatures are and how they are created, using asymmetric cryptography and hash functions. Enjoy!
by Martin Schäffner | 13 October 2020 | Blockchain, Smart Wallet
Datarella, together with CapGemini and Frankfurt School Blockchain Center, successfully applied for a feasibility study funded by the German Federal Environmental Agency (Umweltbundesamt) to explore the benefits of Blockchain technology for an emission trading system based on smart contracts.
During this study, we will work on a concept for an emissions trading register based on DLT. We will make recommendations to the Federal Environmental Agency with regards to the requirements to a DLT trading platform such as usability, scalability, performance, interoperability, security and sustainability.
Ongoing climate change is one of the major global challenges we face today. As a result, a cross-border European emission trading system (EU-ETS) is one of the EU’s most relevant tools against global warming. So far, its success is threatened by fraud and lack of transparency. Stakeholders acting in this system also complain about the absence of incentives to actually reduce emissions. With this study we will prove that by the use of Blockchain technology most of these issues will be solved thanks to the decentralized and transparent characteristics of a DLT system.
We are very much looking forward to working on this study with our partners CapGemini and FSBC in close cooperation with the German Federal Environmental Agency. We will of course keep you updated on any results we achieve.
by Martin Schäffner | 22 September 2020 | Blockchain, SmartAid
We are proud to announce that SmartAid is under the winning team of two EU funded Horizon 2020 programs: Blockchers and Blockpool.
SmartAid is the next generation marketing, funding and reporting tool for non-profit organizations, seamlessly connecting donors with charitable projects. Blockchain technology allows SmartAid to introduce a new era of transparency, efficiency and effectiveness within the aid industry. By drastically reducing costs, SmartAid maximizes the value, which arrives at the people in need.
The Background
Our world is facing global challenges. Next to the almost ordinary crisis, like natural disasters, the effects of climate change, and wars, we need to deal with the pandemic outbreak of COVID-19, which has been tragic and costs many lives. However, while the economic consequences are going to hurt developed countries, they are going to be devastating for the developing world. Already before the pandemic, over 200 million people were assessed in need of humanitarian assistance.
To fight sorrow and misery, to create perspectives for humans living in less privileged countries and to turn our world into a better place for everyone, requires the help of the wealthy population. In the year 2019, over 25.3 billion EUR have been donated worldwide for international humanitarian assistance, almost 2 billion EUR from EU institutions alone, and over 2.5 billion EUR from Germany. (1)
The Problem
In poor countries, even small amounts of money can make the difference between sending your kid to school or sending them hungry to bed. Unfortunately, any type of costs diminish the value, which arrives at the people in need.
SmartAid addresses the high costs, arising through a lack of transparency and automation in the charity industry. Opaque and outdated systems result in high expenses for both donors and aid projects. For receiving organizations, financial reporting to their sponsors is related to substantial efforts. In return, the financiers also need to invest money to audit their aid projects. Manual reporting is not only costly but also vulnerable to human error and even fraud. Corruption is often an issue in aid-receiving countries. Furthermore, uncertainty about whether their donations indeed arrive at the intended destination might reduce the willingness of private donors to contribute.
In addition, the costs related to foreign fiat currency transfer are exorbitantly high. Bank fees, which eat up to 30% of the transaction volume, are no rarity. Furthermore, once donations are transferred and covered into the local currency, funds are exposed to high inflation risk, possibly making them worthless within weeks. Last but not least, measuring the impact of a donation today is very costly and can be only vaguely estimated through long term studies and surveys.
The Solution
Transparency and automation allow the creation of efficiency gains. SmartAid eliminates unnecessary cost drivers, caused through manual reporting systems, in the charity and non-profit industry.
In the current development phase, SmartAid uses a pull approach to mirror donations in fiat currency, like Euro, on the SmartAid blockchain. A PayPal API connects the traditional fiat payment world with our blockchain system, where all funding streams are documented tamper-proof, transparent and in historical order. For each donor, an individual token contract is deployed, a matching amount of tokens minted, and transferred to an address, representing the beneficiary’s bank account. By representing individual donations through a unique – thus distinguishable token, full transparency about the usage of each donor fund can be provided. This allows users of SmartAid to trace the journey of their very own donation. Certainly, also, outgoing payments are documented on the SmartAid Blockchain fully automated via the PayPal API without the costs and risks of manual accounting.
In future development stages, SmartAid can switch to a push approach. In that case, aid projects can use tokens received in multiple ways and leverage their utility. Tokens will be redeemable as vouchers at the SmartAid platform for national currency.
Further, these value units are going to be transferable to addresses, representing cost centres within an organization. Also, tokens will be usable as a medium of exchange between the charity organizations, aid implementing projects and final recipients without intermediaries, bank fees or inflation risks and fully transparent. Lastly, it will be possible to create new project tokens, leveraging a donor fund backed reserve to increase the liquidity.
The digital documentation of newly created project tokens allows non-profits and their financiers to automatically measure the impact and the value created by a donation. This will allow an effective fund allocation in the future, maximizing the generated value.
Why Blockchain
Blockchain technology allows SmartAid to document transactions in a transparent, tamper-proof, and trustless way. Distributing copies of the ledger, which keeps track of the past and current state of the SmartAid ecosystem, makes it secure and eliminates the risk of any single actor manipulating the history. Also, blockchain allows creating and managing new vouchers aka. tokens in a secure manner at neglectable costs.
Join SmartAid
If you want to learn more about SmartAid, check out our previous posts. Please feel free to contact us if you want support SmartAid by becoming a sponsor or have interesting project proposals.
(1) http://devinit.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/GHA-report-2019.pdf
by Martin Schäffner | 22 September 2020 | Blockchain
What Is A Blockchain Address?
Just like your home address, bank address, or email address a blockchain address is a unique and secure identifier. This identifier, saved on a blockchain, can be used for sending and receiving cryptocurrencies. However, in contrast to traditional addresses, blockchain addresses are not assigned by centralized authorities. These addresses are mathematically derived from a user-generated private key.
Learn more about blockchain addresses and the two types, which exits in the Ethereum Network, in our Datarella Blockchain Bites slideshow of this week: Blockchain Addresses.
by Martin Schäffner | 8 September 2020 | Blockchain
“Not Your Keys – Not Your Bitcoin!”
Maybe you came across this quote from the Bitcoin advocate Andreas Antonopoulos. With “keys” he is referring to the private keys, which allow users to transfer bitcoins and other crypto assets.
This is the first post of Datarella’s “Blockchain Bites” in which we want to dive in blockchain terms, bite by bite, in a visualized way.
First up, we will have a look at what is actually a private key:
by Martin Schäffner | 20 August 2020 | Blockchain
We are proud to announce, that Datarella is now an official member of the Alastria Network.
Alastria is a non-profit association that promotes the digital economy through the development of Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT).
We are looking forward to developing sustainable use cases and to providing valuable solutions to industry partners.
Further, we are joining the Alastria Identity Committee to thrive the development of SSI solutions with our expertise.
by Martin Schäffner | 10 August 2020 | Blockchain, KOSMoS
How can a blockchain-based system without a central authority be managed in a well-organized manner? Often, problems like a limited amount of trust or missing rules and processes make it easy to create chaos in such an ecosystem. The challenge is to define processes and a binding set of rules while leaving enough space for potential changes. We faced this challenge of governing the KOSMoS consortium blockchain.
The KOSMoS ecosystem runs on a Hyperledger-based consortium blockchain. It enables private channels between a defined subset of actors that allows them to work on a shared database that is not accessible from not authorized parties. Usually, the industrial partner provides one Hyperledger-Framework with individual channels for each customer. This collaboration needs a governing framework with a set of defining rules and obligations for each participant and managing and working processes inside the system. At KOSMoS, we faced this challenge and summarized it in a governance model.
In the first step, we defined the stakeholders of the ecosystem and described their roles, such as the roles of the industrial partner, their customers, and potential trust stewards that can act on behalf of one party. Furthermore, we defined universal voting rights and a general voting scheme that says that all parties are equal, and decisions are only valid if all parties agree.
After defining and describing the stakeholders, we determined the governance structure that acts as the basis for decision making. Since the industrial partner actively runs the Hyperledger network, we defined a semi-decentralized structure with a slightly more powerful industrial partner than the customers. Furthermore, we added processes for changing the governance policy.
In the next step, the Hyperledger network and channel policy needed to be defined. We established procedures for changes in organizations or the infrastructure, such as adding or removing a node from the system.
Last but not least, we defined basic rules for generating, transferring, processing, and interpreting machine and production data. These rules provide information on who can write and read the data and contains a set of penalties for breaking the rules.
We further left the industrial partner the possibility to change the governance model for their specific purposes in their systems. Therefore, this governance model will act as a reference implementation and can moreover be used for other blockchain-based consortiums.
These pillars create the fundament for the KOSMoS Governance Model. Even though we received a lot of positive feedback from the project partners, there will likely be changes to the future’s governance model. Once finished, the governance model will be released at the end of the project.
The KOSMoS research project aims to provide a blockchain-based collaboration platform for industrial partners and their customers. Besides Datarella, there are eight consortium partners from the sector research, machine maintenance, and IT-service providers. Read more about KOSMoS on our Datarella website or visit the project website.
by Martin Schäffner | 10 August 2020 | Blockchain
Datarella successfully applied for the Blockpool program and is very proud to announce that it was selected into the 25 companies working on promising Blockpool solutions. The Blockpool call received over 100 proposals from 27 European countries, in more than 11 different DLT-technologies and directly affecting 8 economic sectors.
At Blockpool, Datarella will work on an important Blockchain feature supporting our product called SmartAid. SmartAid is an innovative donation platform that leverages the advantages of blockchain to bring efficiency, transparency, and trust into the world of donations. SmartAid is the world’s first fully digital application for donating and tracing the way of your money to selected charity projects. Projects all over the world can participate and receive donations through SmartAid. The use of Blockchain technology allows for
- Secure transactions,
- Traceability,
- Intuitive handling and navigation,
- Simple overview of donations, and
- Transparent transaction history.
The goal of the Blockpool program is to support cross-border DLT-based initiatives and deployment in a broad industry range. It’s primary ambition is to lead to a more cutting-edge and competitive European industry as well as to the structuring of the emerging value chain of DLTs beyond financial markets. This program is funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program.
We are very much looking forward to further developing our product SmartAid in close cooperation with the partners backing the Blockpool initiative.
by Martin Schäffner | 27 July 2020 | Blockchain
Will my donation arrive at the people in need? Or will it get lost, somewhere in the administration costs of a humanitarian organization? Today, intransparent systems confront donors with a high degree of uncertainty, which diminishes their overall willingness to donate. Therefore, we at Datarella teamed up with the YOU Stiftung to create the next generation of donation platform for sustainable aid projects – SmartAid.
SmartAid is reinventing online charitable giving by implementing our Traceable Donation Technology – powered by Blockchain. SmartAid offers its users a unique donation experience with three distinct key value propositions:
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- An effortless donation experience
- An engaging donation experience
- A trustless donation experience
An Effortless Donation Experience
The first barrier, which hinders people from supporting impactful aid projects is the haze related to donating. Our goal is to make supporting these projects, which are often located on the other side of the world, as easy as buying a coffee. No login, no IBANS, no SWIFTs, no hidden fees, no subscriptions, no minimum amount, no bs. Simply scan a QR-Code, whether it is on a billboard at the metro station or on your computer screen or click a link and you will find yourself on the highly intuitive donation home page of SmartAid. Just a few clicks are required to conduct your good deed. Simply choose your favorite payment method and you help to create prospects for less privileged people.
An Engaging Donation Experience
After your payment was processed, you will be rewarded with a unique QR-Code. Share this code and the attached link with your friends and family to show them the journey of your donation. Sending it to your community will also make it easy for you to find it back in your messaging history. Also, since SmartAid is a web app, you can download it to your home screen – just like a traditional app but without the hassle of downloading it from the app store.
A Trustless Donation Experience
The received QR-Code makes it not only easy to find your donation ID back in your message history, but it holds all the information required to track your very own donation among all others. At this point, SmartAid differentiates to traditional donation platforms – no trust is required since everything is documented immutably and transparently on the SmartAid Blockchain.
Traditional donation systems vs. SmartAid’s traceable donations
As illustrated in the graphic above, traditional donation systems allocate fiat currencies, like EUR, USD, in one pot, and distributed to different cost centers of an aid organization. Therefore, traditional donation platforms cannot provide donors visibility about the usage of their funds.
In contrast, on SmartAid each incoming donation is documented on the private Ethereum SmartAid Blockchain. To enable full transparency of the whereabout and usage of each individual donation, each payment will be represented by its own ERC-20 token contract. Each of these token contracts are distinguishable by their contract address. As visualized in the graphic above by different colors, this allows granting SmartAid donors blockchain secured clarity about how their funds will be used.
The donation tracker then provides the user an overview of the status of his donation. Here she will also be informed about the actual usage of her kind donation.
Donating hard-earned money to charity is a noble gesture. It requires a high amount of trust and transfers a significant amount of responsibility to the receiving party. Unfortunately, intransparent systems confront donors, as well as aid organizations, with a high degree of opaqueness. Donors face a high degree of uncertainty about the usage of their givings, which in turn diminishes their overall willingness to donate. At the same time, aid organizations are suffering from high costs of reporting to and providing their donors with formal audits. In both cases, the value which arrives at the people in need is significantly reduced. Therefore, we at Datarella are working with our partners on SmartAid to create the next generation of donation platform.
We are proud to announce that SmartAid is also among the winners of the EU funded H2020 accelerator Blockchers. Here we are going to extend the functionalities of SmartAid for aid organizations.
Stay tuned!
