How can on-chain businesses and DAOs share sensitive documents with a select audience, using only decentralized technology? Until now, there hasn’t been a great solution to this problem. So the team at FiftyWei built one.
Fifty Wei is a Web3 collective created by 3 professionals united by a passion for cutting-edge technology. Their private document sharing solution is now available on Secret Network mainnet. Let’s dig a little deeper into the problem, their solution, and how they leveraged Secret’s tech to make it happen.
The Need for Selective Sharing with Sensitive Documents
There is a critical need for businesses and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) to share sensitive administrative and confidential data with a select audience. There are some documents that only a few people in the world should be able to see. Imagine documents like these leaking:
- Financial Statements: Detailed reports of the organization’s financial position, including balance sheet, portfolio, revenue, expenses.
- Trade Secrets: Confidential information related to a company’s products, processes, or methods that give them a competitive advantage.
- Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs): Legal contracts between employees, partners, or vendors that obligate them to keep specific information confidential.
- Strategic Planning Documents: Internal documents outlining a company’s long-term goals, objectives, and strategies.
- Employee Data: Information about employees, including salaries, performance reviews, and personal details, which can be considered sensitive and confidential.
- Product Development Plans: Information about new products, features, or technologies under development, which can be a valuable competitive advantage.
- Legal Documents: Confidential legal documents, such as contracts, patents, copyrights, or litigation information, that are sensitive to the company’s operations or reputation.
- Meeting Minutes/Notes: Records of discussions and decisions made during meetings, which may contain sensitive or confidential information about the company’s operations, strategies, or financial situation.
There are many centralized Web2 solutions for this, but if an organization wants to utilize decentralized technology, it’s much tougher to do.
FiftyWei’s Solution using Secret Network
You’ve probably heard of IPFS. It’s an open system to manage data without a central server, for decentralized file storage and sharing. The problem with it, for this use-case, is that anyone can access an IPFS file. There’s no built-in access control. Because of this, it would be unthinkable for a business to store their most sensitive data there without some kind of additional data protection. To enable exclusive viewing capabilities, FiftyWei’s solution encrypts documents before storing them on IPFS.
To do this, their SDK generates an encryption key locally, which allows the key holder to decrypt the IPFS file and read it. The next challenge is in safely storing this key in a decentralized way, and that’s where Secret Network comes in. On Secret, a smart contract’s state and inputs and outputs can be encrypted, so the decryption key can be stored in the smart contract. This can also be achieved cross-chain from an EVM network by using Secret’s Confidential Computing Layer, and this is exactly how FiftyWei designed their solution. This means their SDK can be utilized by dApps on nearly any EVM blockchain!
Let’s say that a DAO on Polygon wants to use this document sharing solution. A dApp can be designed that allows DAO members to encrypt and upload a document, and then share that document with another DAO member. This can be achieved with the users only needing to spend native MATIC tokens and using their existing wallet, while the dApp handles the communication with Secret on the backend. FiftyWei’s solution utilizes Axelar GMP for message passing between the EVM network and Secret. The cross-chain communication is abstracted away from the user, giving them a magical user-experience with minimal effort.
Start Using FiftyWei’s SDK
This open-source SDK is now available to the public! If you’re a developer from an EVM chain and this sounds interesting to you, check out the SDK on FiftyWei’s Github repository, and their demos for basic use cases. Secret Network’s developer documentation also has a tutorial on setting this up. If you need development help, join the Secret Discord and check out the dev channels, or Secret’s dev community Telegram group. If you want to learn more about FiftyWei or get in touch with their team, check out their website.
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