While DecentraTech encompasses a broad collection of hardware and software technologies, the current principal focus of the Collective is on those that enable the implementation of privacy-first Web3 applications, and in particular those that support the development and deployment of responsible artificial intelligence applications.

 

As such, the Collective is actively engaging with innovators that are bringing DecentraTech technologies and business models to these spaces:

Data Storage – unlike monolithic, centrally-managed datacenters and data warehouses, decentralized storage approaches comprise many entities that manage their own datasets while making them accessible to others (for a reward, typically paid in tokens).

Individual datasets will likely be combined, normalized, and made available via unified protocols to provide massive volumes of data to applications. Typically, the costs associated with accessing decentralized data is a fraction of those required for traditional storage, while other benefits include fault tolerance, resilience, and censorship protection. Given the need of artificial intelligence models to be trained on the most complete data, decentralized storage has great potential to be leveraged to provide that data cost effectively.
 

Compute Power – many business applications, including transaction processing, analytics and especially artificial intelligence require enormous amounts of compute power to run them at scale to support their user base. Traditional datacenters are costly and time consuming to build, and may not be able to be fully utilized due to a lack of affordable power, need for cooling, etc.

Like decentralized storage, decentralized computing leverages the available compute power of many individual and corporate workstations and servers, and makes it available in aggregate to power applications, with artificial intelligence being one of increasing interest. As with decentralized storage, the providers of compute power are rewarded, generally in tokens.

​

Note: Both decentralized storage and decentralized compute fall into the increasingly popular Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks (DePIN) category.

​

Privacy-Enhanced Technologies (PETs) - are a suite of tools that can help maximize the use of data by reducing risks inherent to data use. A focus for the Collective is on cryptographic approaches to enable collaborative analysis and processing on private datasets, allowing data to be used without disclosing copies of data.

Using PETs such as zero knowledge proofs, homomorphic encryption and multi-party computation, applications including those that use artificial intelligence can benefit from access to data, while it remains private and secure.

​

The Collective also takes an interest in other technologies, such as public blockchains, oracles, and Edge computing. It also tracks DecentraTech use, for data provenance, Web3, DeFi, and Health 3.0.

 

Moreover, the Collective follows developments at other organizations, such as the Decentralized Trust Foundation (Hyperledger as was), Decentralized Identity Foundation and the Confidential Computing Foundation.

 

The DecentraTech Collective is free to join, subject to basic qualification. Interest from DecentraTech vendors and those leveraging DecentraTech is welcome.