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filecoin-project
TransCrypts - Consumer Empowered Record Management
Problem and Project Introduction:
Verification Issuance and On-Chain Records
In the following grant application, I will be introducing two use cases where we (TransCrypts) have used distributed ledger (HyperLedger Fabric Blockchain) and distributed storage (IPFS) technology to bring value to real world problems, and thereby bringing value to the broader Filecoin and Web3 community. The first use case is Medical Record distribution for record ownership, record resiliency and better collaboration between healthcare providers. The second use case is Verification Issuance for income and work experience, so that individuals can own and quickly verify their credentials.
Everyone has that box at home with all their important documents. Our goal is to take that box and make it digital and store it on the blockchain so all that information is immutable and verifiable. Our goal with TransCrypts is to create a plug & play platform that can work with any type of verification document. Our execution plan is to Start with employment and income verification documents, Expand into different verticals (Identity, Medical, Legal Records, etc), and finally Become the platform through which all of your important documents are stored and verified.
Medical Use case:
Blockchain medical records allow for individuals to have full access and control over their medical history. Right now, medical records are owned and controlled by hospitals or other medical record providers and for a variety of financial and ethical reasons there is a huge problem with that. For example, in the US it is not uncommon for hospitals to charge record transfer fees if an individual switches provider or receives care at a different facility. The concept of paying for access to one's own records is unethical and not having access to these records can prove to be fatal. A study by Harvard University and the University of Utah found that current EHR(electronic health records) fail to detect 33% of mistakes in a patient's medical record. The issue with current EHR providers is due to the patients limited access to their own medical history they can't fact check their own record. It is incumbent on health care providers to adopt better technology to help reduce the error rates on EHRs and through an EHR backed by a distributed ledger we can help save lives by allowing the patient themselves to serve as fact checkers to their own medical record. We believe the ability for the individual to view their medical records for any errors is a big reason why we saw a 37% increase in quality of care in an A/B analysis over patients with alternate records or no records.
Another major benefit we learned through our pilot in Ukraine was that the blockchain can replace the role of the human verifier with a distributed and decentralized mechanism for trust allowing for a full automation of the transfer of documents between a patient's medical network. In a hypothetical situation let us take Yulia (One of the participants in our Ukraine Pilot) and her penicillin allergy. With her TransCrypts based medical records she is able to share her complete medical history with any physician anywhere in the world on demand. It will show the physician who issued the document, when it was issued, and to whom it was issued. Every new treatment Yulia receives becomes a new block in her blockchain and helps create a synchronized timeline of her medical history, thereby mapping her medical history for better diagnosis and collaboration between health providers. The best thing about this is that Yulia can share her records with anyone and revoke access whenever she wants. Her data can even be easily migrated off the TransCrypts platform via us allowing her to mint her record as a NFT and moving it off platform via a wallet. This consumer ownership not only allows for easy facilitation between care providers and various third parties but also mitigates the downsides that centralized EHRs have of being easily compromised either physically or virtually.
Infographic:
https://i.imgur.com/0ndQg9g.png
Source: Lakshay Taneja
From what we have learned from our mission in Ukraine was that the reality is that in situations where centralized databases can be compromised it is essential for us to build versatile distributed networks leveraging IPFS technology that allow individuals continuous and high availability access to their important documents and records.
Please read more about our Ukrainian Pilot testing on TransCrypt's blog: https://www.transcrypts.com/blog/ukraine-update
Credential Verification:
Every year human resource departments around the country are overwhelmed with phone calls and emails from background check companies, lenders, and government organizations requesting to verify the information of their current or past employees. Just in the US alone HRs spend 150M hours responding to these verification requests. This amounts to 4.5 B dollars in excess labor costs to employers. Our startup's value proposition is that by automating this task for HRs we can save them billions of dollars in excess labor costs. TransCrypts is a tool for HRs to automate the issuance of employment and income verification documents. It works by connecting to a company's existing HR database (ADP, BambooHR, etc) & using the information already stored in these databases to issue employment and income verification documents directly to their employees. The employee then has full control over their verification document and can share it with any third party (lender, future employer, background check company). These third parties can easily verify the authenticity of the document through the blockchain. Our platform saves HRs time, money, and legal headache in dealing with employee data verification requests, gives employees more control over their employment/income data, and allows verifiers to more efficiently verify information. Our target customers are human resource departments in organizations with 40 or more employees.
We are the first open-source solution that completely automates the issuance of employment and income verification documents and reduces liability for our clients. We focus on data privacy, security and ownership, by giving individuals full access and control over their information/data, we believe we are better positioned for a future where individuals want more control over their data, versus our competitors. The combination of these two things, plus the fact that we cost on average 38% less than our legacy competitors gives us a significant advantage over them, and an advantage that the market has validated based on our fast adoption and growth.
Value
We have been successful in being able to integrate our Web3 solution with existing Web2 technologies. Our focus has been to provide a seamless and integrated User Experience, such that, the end user doesn't necessarily know the technological difference or have a radically alien user experience from what they are used to with Web2 technologies. However, we can give the end user at once an expanded set of functionalities which they did not have before, by leveraging, for example, IPFS and Blockchain. With IPFS, we found that disparate, non-integrated and cross border healthcare providers were able to collaborate together on a patient's health plan. HyperLedger Fabric Blockchain allowed us to map out the patient's health history, how it has developed and how it has been progressing based on the record.
We believe the benefit to the FileCoin community lies in the fact that we have been able to showcase not only the commercial viability, but the user experience benefits of developing distributed record sharing systems through our two major use cases which are healthcare, and identity and credential verification. Our implementation of IPFS on our DAPP first starts with storing a users record as an asset into IPFS via NFT.Storage, as a type of permanent cold storage. We will be using Content Delivery Network to cache the files to ensure quick latency for high priority storage access, such as for background checks or hospital users accessing records. However, CDN is a temporary implementation, we anticipate to grow with Filecoin, as we work with FileCoin to improve latency we will begin to change our storage architecture to a hot/cold model through FileCoin.
The risk is user trust. As long as users continue to use our application to share and manage records, users will view us as custodians of their sensitive data. At TransCrypts we have to be extremely careful in making sure our system is secure and unexploitable. If user data is compromised it could reflect bad not only on TransCrypts, but Web3 and decentralization in general.
Deliverable and Development Roadmap
- Initial Filecoin research
- Number of team members: 2
- Cost: $2000
- Completed: September, 2020
- Build website for file management
- Number of team members: 2
- Cost: $22,000
- Completed: March, 2021
- Integrate with IPFS
- Number of team members: 2
- Cost: $7,000
- Completed: April, 2021
- Integrate with Web3.Storage and NFT.Storage
- Number of team members: 1
- Cost: $500
- Completed: April, 2021
- Research and Integrate with HyperLedger Fabric
- Number of team members: 2
- Cost: $3,000
- Completed: April, 2021
- Customize HyperLedger
- Number of team members: 2
- Cost: $5,000
- Completed: August, 2021
- Develop secure sharing functionality with ownership hierarchy
- Number of team members: 3
- Cost: $7,500
- Completed: October, 2021
- Testing different encryption methods with IPFS and decentralized and distributed storage
- Number of team members: 3
- Cost: $11,000
- Completed: December, 2021
- Researching and revamping UI and UX
- Number of team members: 2
- Cost: $6,500
- Completed: May, 2022
- SOC2 Certification - Due to compliance requirements from enterprise clients (Completed: July, 2022)
- Hiring 3rd party company for Penetration Testing (Completed: June, 2022)
- Cost for SOC2: $25,000 (Recurring $10,000/year)
- Cost for 3rd party PenTest: $27,000
- Developing health record sharing functionality specifically aimed for Ukraine Refugee pilot opportunity.
- Number of team members: 2
- Cost: $3,700
- Completed: May, 2022
- Integrate with Polygon Supernet (Research, Integration and Smart Contract customization).
- Number of team members: 3
- Cost: $7,500
- Completed: September, 2022
- LinkedIn integration to sync verified credentials with LinkedIn profile, and create a verified online resume.
- Number of team members: 2
- Cost: $1,500
- Completed: July, 2022
- External users (non-transcrypt users) will be able to record videos or written letters on the TransCrypts portal for a specific user that will act as "Permanent references" which will get attached to the respective user's account/wallet.
- Number of team members: 2
- Cost: $4,800
- Completed: July, 2022
- Beta testing and Analytics from users
- Number of team members: 2
- Cost: $3000
- Completed: August, 2022
- Continued iteration and improvement
Total Budget Requested
Sum of the total cost for development: $138,000
Requested Budget from Filecoin Open Grant: $95,000
Maintenance and Upgrade Plans
The purpose of this project is to showcase the commercial viability of Filecoin and Protocol Lab's technology specifically for a decentralized records management use case. Goal will be to continue expanding our feature set and also breaking into other verticals.
Team
Ali Zaheer Zain Zaidi Reid Spencer Artyom Serdyuk
https://www.linkedin.com/in/zaheeral/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/zainzaidi99/
Team Website:
Media:
Tweet by Mark Cuban about our Medical work:
https://i.imgur.com/YeVbFOy.png
Zain Zaidi Featured as BayArea Inno 25 under 25:
TransCrypt Winners of the $50,000 Prize at Rice Business Competition:
TransCrypt Winners of the University of Toronto Entrepreneurship Competition:
https://twitter.com/UTSCTheHub/status/1501943594470363140
Zain Zaidi was Featured on Techstars.com front page:
TransCrypt Winners of the Silicon Valley Business Plan Competition:
https://www.sjsu.edu/svce/programs/svbpc/past-winners.php
Relevant Experience:
The TransCrypts team was part of the Filecoin Techstars Seattle Cohort 2022. During the Techstars program we got the opportunity to learn a lot about the FIlecoin technology and integrate our team with the Filecoin community. Much of our time was spent on discovering opportunities to integrate Filecoin technology to tackle real world issues and therefore, help continue to strengthen FileCoin community as we move towards a Web3 world.
Team Code Repos:
No public repos.
Hi @AliTranscrypts, thank you for your proposal! We would be interested in funding this work on a smaller scale. Can you submit a reworked proposal that focuses on the file management platform and Filecoin integration?
Hi @AliTranscrypts, I hope you are doing well! Would you be interested in submitting a reworked proposal for this project? Please let me know of any questions.
Hi @ErinOCon Thank you for your's and FileCoin team's consideration for our proposal! We are really excited that FileCoin would like to fund our work, it means a lot our team! So, thank you.
In general our use case will be the same, would you like us to expand upon the file management and FileCoin integration? Or would it suffice if we simply revised the 'Requested Budget' section, with a focus only towards the File Management and FileCoin integration costs? Would it be okay if we just commented below the revised changes?
Thanks, Ali
Hi @AliTranscrypts, thank you for your questions! I would recommend focusing on the file management system, the Filecoin integration, and secure sharing. If this sounds like a preferred approach for your team, can the proposal we reworked to reflect this?
Hi @AliTranscrypts, I hope you are doing well! Do you have any concerns or questions regarding the proposed update?
Hi @ErinOCon , we should have a new proposal for your review in a few days.
Thanks, Ali
Hi @AliTranscrypts let us know if you need any assistance on the proposal rework. Otherwise we're looking forward to your next update.
Hi @AliTranscrypts, I hope you are doing well! Do you expect an update will be available by next week?
@realChainLife @ErinOCon Apologies for the delay in our response. Last few weeks we had been busy working with the NIH to develop and demonstrate a potential interoperability layer for EHRs, and that work was very time sensitive so we had to assign most of our resources to that.
I will update the FileCoin open proposal by tonight for your review, and we can take it from there.
Thanks, @AliTranscrypts! We will continue our review once these updates are provided.
Hi @ErinOCon Apologies for such a long delay. I have finally made the edits as requested!
I have added some more details about how we integrate with Filecoin and how our file management portal works and more specifically how it works in conjunction with Filecoin/web3.storage.
I have changed the requested budget and deliverable road map sections, reflecting the specific scale around Filecoin integration and the file management portal.
In general, I have kept the Problem, Project Introduction and Value sections, for context. For sake of eloquence, I have deleted the write out about the Ukrainian pilot project and have just kept its conclusion. More about it can be viewed on the URL I have linked above.
Let me know if there is anything I missed, or if you would like me to go into greater detail about something.
Thanks, Ali
Hi @AliTranscrypts, I know it has been a considerable amount of time since your edits in December - thank you for your patience! In light of the macroeconomic climate, the review of our budget and priorities for the fiscal year required a longer review window.
Unfortunately, we will not be moving forward with a grant at this time. We are wishing you all the best as you continue to build!