Disclaimer: XKI GmbH, the company behind the DAEX.com project holds a stake in Elastos token.
Over the past half a decade, the sanctity of personal information as it is stored and transacted on the internet has come under a great deal of FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt). It has become apparent that the new ‘data economy’ has come at the expense of the customers and citizens of governments and big business – as a result of leaks, hacks, and internal bad actors.
People are increasingly wary and careful of who they submit their data to, and how it is used, reflected in the manifestation of the growing market for VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) following public scandals such as Cambridge Analytica and the Google hack scandals.
In cryptocurrency, the rise of privacy-oriented tokens such as Monero and zCash supports the same hypothesis, and Brave browser has proven that it is possible to challenge even Google and Mozilla.
All of these products provide modular adjustments to the internet browsing experience with their own benefits, but are limited by the fact that they are built upon pre-existing internet browser technologies. That is to say that the extent of what they can achieve is held back by the capabilities of their foundations.
This is why more attention should be paid to projects such as Elastos, a decentralized open-source, privacy focused internet operating system which was built from the ground up to address the challenges facing users and their data in the present-day internet era.
Elastos was founded by Rong Chen, who brings decades of knowledge with him – in addition to recent experience gained since 2000 when Chen invented Kortide (which eventually evolved into Elastos). In 2012 the company received a significant investment from Taiwan-based Foxconn.
Chen is joined by co-founder Feng Han, who appears to have been tirelessly working towards promotion and networking on behalf of Elastos prior to the full launch of its ‘internet OS’.
Han has been present at events such as the San Francisco Blockchain Week in addition to many more, and met with U.S. Presidential candidate Andrew Yang earlier this month “to discuss the importance of data becoming an individual’s property rights. Data rights and ownership are the aim of #Elastos”.
Whilst the Elastos main-net went live in December 2017, its flagship product ‘Trinity Browser’ is still being built. Trinity is a so called ‘internet OS’ which utilises multiple abstraction layers upon a foundation of blockchain technology, to ensure absolute privacy and obfuscation of personal data from prying eyes and invasive web scripts.
Elastos seeks to build and nurture a community of developers – united by their choice of platform, and a universal accessibility due to the open-source and decentralized nature of the project. The ‘Framework Layer’ will be the driving force behind the Elastos ecosystem, and will act as a community-supported repository of dapps, SDKs and plugins.
Also coming soon is the Elastos ‘scalable sidechain solution’ which allows developers to create their own scalable multi-chain solution and benefit from solidity smart contract compatibility, in addition to high speed DPoS consensus and a custom “redefined” ethereum virtual machine. Sidechain support will begin with ETH and NEO.
Next year, Elastos plans on releasing its own runtime environment which is the culmination of 18 years of development. ‘Elastos Runtime’ will allegedly deliver a “high performance sandbox for dApps”.
Elastos claims that this is the final key to the realization of a “truly decentralized” network, that is absolutely “resistant to attack”.
