Over the last 2 years, we have seen many attempts to offer KYC on Blockchain, KYC was supposed to be the next big thing for Blockchain and nothing happen, why?
Up till now all the public Blockchains had one big issue and this was called data privacy. Public blockchains like Ethereum cannot support keeping some data private. If you cannot support Data Privacy with Public Blockchains you are never going to be able to enable KYC on Blockchain.
Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum inventor and co-founder, himself was saying in early 2016 (Jan 15th 2016 on Ethereum Blog) that the two major problems that public blockchains have are Privacy and scalability and he has been pushing the community ever since to come up with a solution.
For scalability, the Ethereum community is expecting multiple new releases of Ethereum and the new Plasma protocol in the next 2 years to bring the supported number of transactions per second to be more in line with standard centralised systems.
But for Privacy, the Ethereum community has been awfully silent till now. But today, Rockchain, a French Blockchain startup backed by early Ethereum developers and cryptographic researchers is coming out of stealth mode and exposing to the world its solution for data privacy issues on public blockchains. Rockchain is releasing its two main protocols dAppBox & DashRock in Alpha versions and announcing its ROK token sale to the community to help them release quickly this long awaited solution to the Ethereum world.
Rockchain enables distributed applications on the public blockchain to perform calculations, collaboration, orchestration and machine learning on local private data.
This could be the defining moment for KYC on Blockchain and more in general this could really unlock the Blockchain potential for enterprise usage.
Rockchain ICO will open on November 1st and will be the first ICO distributing its token even if their minimum cap is not reached and refunding the participants. This shows true commitment from Rockchain to release its ecosystem to the Ethereum Community, the ICO participants will have a stake in the Rockchain ecosystem even if they get their ethers back.
But we cannot see how this ICO could not be a success, all the use cases, POCs, dApps on Ethereum have long awaited a data privacy solution to emerge and Rockchain is today taking the lead.
By Elie Cezard (Blockchain technology expert / Blockchain Paris Meetup organizer)