Dragonchain and The BPSAA Align for Blockchain Adoption

Recently Dragonchain was accepted to the Blockchain Privacy, Security & Adoption Alliance (BPSAA). The BPSAA serves to educate the public on privacy and security in blockchain. They focus on cross-platform cooperation between projects which seems to be lacking in today’s blockchain ecosystem. The alliance goes beyond just grouping projects together to actively advocating interoperability amongst all members to create a united front to maintain privacy and security.

On a recent episode of Super Happy Dragon Lucky, Draeth, Founder and President at BPSAA joined Joe to discuss the alliance and tackle a few current news stories. Draeth is a Captain at Pirate Chain, one of the founding projects of the alliance. Draeth got his first taste of Bitcoin in 2015 and like a lot of us, technology was a little over his head. But, also like a lot of us he couldn’t stay away and really became immersed in 2016 with mining. He then joined Pirate Chain in 2018 which led him to form the BPSAA with a few of his crewmates.

Adoption

Like Dragonchain, one of the goals of BPSAA is adoption. For them, education takes on a key role in achieving that goal.

Draeth: “We have a ton of plans for educating people not only in the BPSAA about other member’s projects, but also people outside of the BPSAA. We are excited to reach people who aren’t even in crypto. The industry can advertise and build as much as they want but if nobody outside of your bubble knows what you're doing, then it's kind of pointless.”

It’s not easy to bring so many projects together even with a common goal amongst them.

Draeth: “The biggest challenge, so far, is trying to figure out how to get everyone to work together. In crypto, we’ve been trained for so long to stay in our pigeonholes. Everyone seems to focus on their own stuff instead of helping each other out. We firmly believe if we build together we can make something huge.”

Old habits die hard but Joe is hopeful.

Joe: “The BPSAA was interesting to me because Dragonchain has been fighting tribalism forever. We’re an interoperability company. That's what we do. It's not valuable if everybody's fighting. Early on the culture was very open and open source friendly. It was very liberty focused. It was even very privacy and security focused. But, when Bitcoin was forked, it was such a toxic environment, no matter which side you were on and even if you were on both sides. I think that culture has stood because the regulators came in and at the same time when all of the other projects popped out a lot were also tribal by nature. I'm hoping that what you guys are doing is going to correct some of that, heal some of that, maybe open up a new way of handling the industry.”

Draeth: “We see this with business in general as they compete with each other. You see multiple privacy clients that compete when realistically they should just be working together. We want different algorithms and different privacy protocols. We can't just stick with one because if one gets compromised, everybody's compromised. We are making progress. There has been quite a bit of natural collaboration between projects and I'm really happy to see that.”

Dragonchain agrees and believes the best way to facilitate adoption quickly is to allow businesses to maintain their sovereignty. Businesses that have proprietary systems and processes need not conform and change everything to be able to use blockchain technology and capitalize on all the benefits therein.

Dragonchain makes it easy for businesses to maintain sovereignty by using their existing systems with blockchain technology. Dragonchain’s Interchain™ technology non-discriminatory and interops blockchains to other blockchains, blockchains to traditional systems, and even traditional systems to each other. This can be achieved with a simple software integration. There is no need for businesses to abandon the systems they already use. This level of interoperability will be helpful when integrating with the other projects in the alliance. The benefit of this approach is for a company or project in the alliance is they can maintain their systems while integrating with others.

Security

The conversation then turned to the proposed new US law requiring KYC on withdrawals including hardware wallets and the effect on the industry if such a law passed and its impact on the ecosystem.

Draeth: “Personally, I think decentralized exchanges (DEX) will just instantly rise up over centralized exchanges as the primary use for trade because you don't need to register. You can actually run it anywhere. The proposed law is unfortunate and dangerous because centralized exchanges are a centralized point of attack. If this bill passes it could be dangerous. All KYC data is now vulnerable if an exchange ends up getting hacked. Look at Ledger yesterday. There is an insane amount of information that the hackers can pull from that and then just use against you. They now know how much you're storing at your house and that's pretty evil and they have access to that information because of this regulation.”

Factor

There is no getting around the fact that businesses must adhere to KYC/AML regulations. But that doesn’t mean they need to open themselves and their customers up to the risks associated with storing large amounts of personally identifiable information (PII).

The selective nature of Dragonchain’s architecture extends into its identity management system. Factor is a GDPR and CCPA capable decentralized identity management system to reduce liability and protect the identity of customers and employees.

The benefit for individuals is granular control. By breaking up individual pieces of identity information, people can selectively release what is minimally necessary for proving identity. A factor includes things like your first name, your full name, your birth date, etc. Dragonchain takes it one step further with derived factors. Derived factors can attest that you are a certain age, 21 for example, without revealing your birth date.

The benefit for businesses is they can prove KYC without storage of PII. Factor has an additional benefit for interoperability between systems where PII is part of the equation becomes much easier and secure. People can stipulate who has access to what data and for how long. Taking sensitive data out of a central database reduces costs, risks, and legal liabilities for businesses as well.

Additional security applies to the transaction itself. There are other operational hybrid blockchains however, only Dragonchain uses the hash power of multiple blockchains to secure the decentralized proof of an event. The Transaction Security Value measures the hash power and electricity cost applied to a transaction since it was posted. Starting in the millions of dollars, the value continually increases over time as more Ethereum and Bitcoin blocks are added to the chains.

Keeping up with the ever-changing regulatory environment is a challenge. Joe has seen first hand the effects of overreach.

Joe: “I know when we ran the Blockchain Seattle meetup, there was a really amazing example of this. I can't remember which one but there was an attack on an exchange that would not have occurred if the regulators hadn't forced the exchange to do a certain act, which was not the best security practice. It was a legal decision of engineering, kind of like what you saw at Chernobyl or Challenger disaster, when the bean counters or the lawyers get involved in engineering decisions, you have disasters awaiting you. So how do you keep up with all this? Europe is different. It's different in parts of Asia. The US is different. How do you keep up, especially focused on privacy and security?

Draeth: “Realistically, you just have to keep reading what the lawmakers are producing as far as potential bills and things like that. If something comes out that's going to ruin privacy for every individual we've got to team up with people like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) to fight against those things and bring it to their attention. One thing I noticed about the EFF is that they do a fantastic job, but they don't really have a presence in crypto. We're trying to work with them to reinforce that this is an area that needs to be focused on. We do a lot of research on things that help protect users' privacy.

Privacy

Dragonchain’s hybrid architecture of distributed blockchains assists in the protection of privacy. The business blockchain allows businesses to maintain their sensitive data on their own private blockchain. They can then selectively expose any amount of data to whomever they need to. Businesses use their private blockchains to secure their data and provide a private immutable record. Proof of an event is then decentralized to multiple public blockchains for security, transparency, and accountability.

As the year comes to a close excitement is building for the possibilities of the new year ahead.

Joe: “What are your plans for 2021?”

Draeth: “The BPSAA is working hard on getting our nonprofit status. We're currently finishing up the application process. We’re creating an educational wing. We have a ton of ideas, including offering courses for developers to learn other languages and to learn about Blockchain. Courses for regular people to just learn about Blockchain. We want to expand the span of the members of the BPSAA. We want to create more interoperability. And the list goes on and on and on.”

Dragonchain is looking forward to working with the BPSAA and all members of the alliance to bring privacy, security, and adoption to businesses so they can benefit from blockchain technology.

To see how Dragonchain can maintain privacy and security for your systems contact us.

To learn more about the BPSAA visit them at BPSAA.vision.

See the entire episode Super Happy Dragon Lucky here.