SmartCon 2024 featured presentations from more than 100 blockchain industry pioneers and financial leaders, who gathered to highlight the convergence of TradFi and DeFi into a more efficient global financial system. To delve deeper into the most groundbreaking topics from this year’s event, Nasdaq TradeTalks host Jill Malandrino interviewed some of the most influential speakers on-site at Hong Kong’s Kerry Hotel.
Mathew Harrowing is the co-founder of innovative decentralized data management platform Instruxi. He sat down with Malandrino to discuss how web3 technologies give web2 businesses more control over data privacy and sovereignty.
“Web2 has a lot of issues – we’ve lost a lot of privacy and a lot of our data has gone in the wind over the last few years,” Harrowing said. “Something web3 does really well is move keys around; it’s great at managing cryptographic proofs. So our hypothesis, and what we’ve proven with our clients, is that by bringing both architectures together, we can harden web2 using web3 principles.”
Instruxi recently joined forces with Chainlink, CLEAR, and Space and Time to launch the Instruxi Mesh ID – a cutting-edge, privacy-preserving identity solution that streamlines access to tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) for over 22 million U.S. residents.
“One of the big issues in web2 is that when we want to try and scale data, we make copies of it, and then once we make a copy of it, we create risk,” Harrowing explained.
The Instruxi Mesh ID utilizes the web3 concept of private keys to give data owners control over who accesses their information.
“By decentralizing how you access web2 under a public and private key pair, we create a cryptographic framework upon which to nest web2 applications,” said Harrowing.
He underscored Instruxi’s goal to help create and reinforce an ethical, user-controlled incentive model amid the push to commercialize private health data as an intangible asset.
“We want to be able to provide informed consent over how that data is used – so, for instance, I’m happy for my genome to be used for medical research, but not for bio terrorism,” he explained. “Web3 gives us an ability to govern data no matter where it is through an intent to consent framework.”
Instruxi Mesh ID is the inaugural module of Instruxi’s RWA platform, which leverages CLEAR’s API to streamline the KYC process without sacrificing security or privacy. Mesh ID also utilizes Chainlink Functions for access to real-world data from APIs and Chainlink Automation for programmable, scalable, cost-efficient operations.
“We’re bringing together hundreds of millions of dollars of new assets onchain that are completely new financial instruments that no one has seen before,” Harrowing said.
He described Chainlink as an essential tool box empowering Instruxi to construct a new data privacy model that enhances legacy web2 infrastructure with the advantages of web3.
“This is a whole new way of thinking about infrastructure, and what Chainlink gives us is the ability to use these new toolkits and re-architecture our existing infrastructure to make it work better.”
Instead of copying data into different databases with access to different users, Instruxi’s mesh architecture gives data owners a single point to control who can access their data at specific times and under specific conditions.
“Think of it like you’ve got an embassy and the data has a passport,” he explained. “There are certain elements of data that you allow to be transferred, you allow to be queried. The Instruxi data mesh is able to orchestrate through the governance layer your ability to access data you should be able to access, no matter where it is – whether in web2 or web3.”
Watch Jill Malandrino’s full interview with Mathew Harrowing.