summary: Dock is a Decentralized data exchange protocol that lets people connect their profiles and experiences across the web.
content: Dock Cryptocurrency (founded in July, 2017) is a Decentralized data exchange protocol that lets people connect their profiles, reputations and experiences across the web with privacy and security. It is a digital Currency which has been designed to help solve the issue of data hoarding while using Blockchain technology. Dock provides a range of tools incorporating Blockchain technology that enables businesses and developers to create verifiable credentials. Overview Dock Operates on the Ethereum Blockchain, It is a Decentralized data exchange protocol that lets people connect their profiles, reputations, and experiences across the web with privacy and security. In its initial use case model, the company envisions itself as something of a ‘decentralized LinkedIn,’ where users can share information such as employment history, educational background, and certified skills. In order to achieve this goal, the crypto will implement a protocol that encourages data exchange and transfer between different digital platforms. According to the team behind the project, Dock crypto which is also referred to as Dock.io will connect profiles, reputations, and networks into one shareable source using the Blockchain technology. The project is designed in such a way that users can take control of their own data and exchange it between 2 or more dApps. This will be made possible through the use of data encryption and an incentivized Token model. Moreover, the Dock.io native currency helps to facilitate information exchange by providing lucrative rewards to all the involved participants. Dock seeks to solve the most difficult issues that face the credential industry today. Currently, most companies rely on centralized platforms that hoard data or issue digital credentials that are easy to forge. Dock was specifically built for this purpose of enabling organizations to create verifiable credentials on a Decentralized network that are cryptographically secured and exist independently of any organization. Dock’s mainnet will enable issuers to create their own decentralized identities (DIDs) to authenticate credentials, while also enabling recipients to control, present, and retain ownership of their credentials. The mainnet is completely open-source and its use of the W3C’s industry-leading standards ensures interoperability across many platforms and applications. By having a dedicated, special-purpose Blockchain, Dock aims to ensure that transaction costs are kept to a minimum and there is no impact from unrelated activities, which is not the case with Ethereum and many other public blockchains. In addition, Dock’s anchoring solution is Blockchain agnostic wherein any Blockchain can be used to anchor credentials issued via Dock and any solution can be used for storing the credentials. Dock provides easy-to-use tooling and infrastructure for issuers to develop apps or integrate with existing solutions. It is also one of the first to utilize the W3C’s Verifiable Credential Data Model (VCDM), a standard born out of work by a diverse international community of experts dedicated to creating open standards across the internet. How Dock Works Under the Dock platform, users can form an ad-hoc network between themselves. In such a setup, all the data will be encrypted using receiver’s on-chain stored public key. According to the team behind the project, the originators of data are only required to be on the internet or online if the data they want to publish is fresh and it has not been published to the network before. The Dock platform employs an open-source standard for anchoring data to the blockchain. This standard was designed to help in the anchoring data to a single chain. It will also be used to make sure that it is possible to prove that updates are done within the native system. According to the team; The executor is the only person within the network who is aware of the latest data updates. Users are able to participate in selective data-sharing. This will be made possible by using third-party applications within the user-application contract. After the application decrypts its update with its own key, it can be used freely by anyone. The user loses control of data after it has been shared with an external application. This will happen whether that information should or should not be shared with other dApps. Sharing data on the Dock.io platform is a simple concept. Users upload whichever data they like to the platform and decide who can access that data. They can connect with companies or applications on the platform and each of these relationships is recorded on the Blockchain through a Smart contract on the Ethereum Blockchain. This is a critical difference from the current centralized platforms, where users can control who views their data, but cannot control the platform’s access to their data. Technical Side of Dock The Dock platform is built on the Ethereum Blockchain and given the network congestion already seen on Ethereum there’s no way for Dock to store and retrieve resume data and the other data it is built to hold. So, the Dock team is using the IPLD specification, which was created to help the open-source peer-to-peer Interplanetary File System (IPFS) perform content addressable data exchange. The IPFS network is similar to a torrent network, but it stores hashed files rather than torrent files. These hashed files are stored in the collection of IPFS nodes, and any time a user needs to retrieve a file they do so by calling its associated hash from the Blockchain. This lowers the overhead for the blockchain since it doesn’t need to store the data, just an associated hash. While the platform is committed to the Ethereum Blockchain, for now, the team has said that they will consider creating their own native, standalone Blockchain in the future if it becomes necessary. The Dock Data Sharing Model Dock data sharing is controlled by the tokenomics model of the platform, which is pretty unique in the world of decentralization and incentivization. The first difference is the DOCK token denomination, which the team has said should be done in fiat rather than Ethereum like most projects. In fact, the ICO was valued in United States dollar rather than Ethereum. The reasoning for this is to encourage price stability. It’s well known how volatile cryptocurrency prices can be and the team believes that by using fiat to denominate the Dock token they can avoid extreme price swings. The other difference is the way Dock creates incentives, which is focused on applications rather than users. Dock Application Incentives The Dock system has created incentives for applications to share data with each other via the Dock tokens. Basically, if an application wants to acquire data from another application it needs to pay for that data. This system also prevents applications from hoarding data because the sharing of data is involuntary. There is no way for an application to prevent another application from paying for its data. Only the user can create rules that prevent data from being shared. In this way, Dock prevents data hoarding from occurring on the platform. Dock User Incentives Unlike nearly every other Decentralized platform with tokens, the Dock platform does not incentivize users to share their data. This was done intentionally and deliberately. The Dock team wants people to come to the realization that their data is far more valuable than they believe, and that any amount paid for their personal data isn’t enough. Instead, they want users to value their data for its own sake. There’s another reason not to incentivize users for providing data, and that’s to avoid a flood of people spamming the platform with false information simply to collect rewards. Dock realizes this would be the fastest way to kill the platform, and they are avoiding it in any way possible. Moreover, the lack of incentives actually makes things clearer for users, who won’t have to worry about keeping up with micro-transactions and payments. All they have to focus on is making sure that their personal information is up to date. Rather than offering small payments for valuable data, Dock is giving users complete control over their data and convenience. By keeping data all in one place users are easily able to control who can access their data, and they can maintain the data without having to go through the trouble of remembering all the different sites that have a profile for them. This keeps data always updated across the web and avoids scenarios where people are seeing data that are no longer up-to-date. Consensus Dock is built on and uses the consensus mechanism offered by Substrate which is a hybrid as it separates block production and finality and achieves them through different methods. The finality is achieved through a finality gadget called GRANDPA (GHOST-based Recursive ANcestor Deriving Prefix Agreement). It finalizes chains rather than individual blocks and offers provable finality. More details on GRANDPA are available on the Web3 Foundation's. It is implemented in Substrate in. Dock will start with a Proof-of-authority (PoA) network and therefore the block production algorithm in this phase will be. This algorithm divides time into fixed intervals and gives each validator an equal chance to produce 1 block in round-robin intervals. It is implemented in Substrate in. When Dock transitions into utilizing PoS, the block production algorithm changes from Aura to BABE (Blind Assignment for Blockchain Extension protocol) which selects a validator for each slot (interval of time) randomly using a VRF (Verifiable Random Function). BABE is similar to IOHK's. Governance The Dock Gove