TransCrypts - Consumer Empowered Record Management

[AliTranscrypts]

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 FileCoin, IPFS and Hyperledger Fabric 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.

Medical Use case:

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 interoperability portal backed by distributed storage and a distributive 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.

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.

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.

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(UPDATE) FileCoin Integration and File Management Platform:

Centralized storage and Private IPFS network setup

Some of our enterprise clients want to onboard as a phased approach. The first phase being, data should be stored on a reputable cloud service and the last phase being entirely decentralized.

For this phase we stored data on multiple Amazon S3 buckets connected to multiple EC2 instances. The goal was to demonstrate the viability of having data geographically/regionally spatialized data (Amazon Regions) redundancies through IPFS. For this we had to setup a private IPFS network and cluster for data perseverance and redundancy. The steps to do this included:

1. Creating a VM image with GO and ipfs-go installed
2. Generating a swarm key
3. Connecting and configuring all of our nodes to the bootstrap node
4. Initializing ipfs on all nodes
5. Setting up IPFS daemon
6. Installing IPFS-cluster on all nodes
7. Generating Cluster_secret and configuring it on all nodes
8. Initializing cluster on all nodes
9. Setting up cluster daemon

Storage on Filecoin through web3.storage

For most of our clients’ storage needs we are leveraging web3.storage to store data directly on FileCoin. Web3.Storage allows us to have a very eloquent way of integrating with FileCoin, for storing and retrieving data from filecoin and viewing filecoin contracts. However, the only extra bit of programming we do is to manipulate the Content Archive CAR to associate keywords or metadata to files through the JSON format using the DAG-JSON codec. Our goal is to eventually allow for greater interoperability between, for example, Electoronic Heath Record platforms, such that they would be able to search through the inter planetary linked data and be able to find content based on keywords or specific identifiers, such as metadata, that are not just CIDs.

File Management Portal

File Organization: We borrowed the front end user experience from OneDrive/Dropbox, such that user can create directories and files can be saved under specific directories. Files can be moved and put in trash, deleted.

When files are indeed deleted on the file management protal, we unpin the files on the ipfs cluster and private network so that they are eventually cleaned from the network. However, as web3.storage does not at the moment have an in-built automation method to delete files either through API or client libraries, we have built out an automation workflow using python scripting to automate the process of going into the web3.storage account through a browser, selecting the specific file based on CID and deleting it. The mechanism to ensure we are deleting the correct file is to use web3.storage’s ‘Query’ function to validate the CID of file requested to be deleted on TransCrypts file management portal matches the CID on web3.storage.

Upload: Users can upload files directly to the platform (through an upload button), which then get uploaded (stored) either to the S3 bucket or web3.storage through API, depending on use case.

However, files can be viewed in directories and even opened through the portal.

Pulling HR data from payroll platforms, or health data from EHRs can be a little complex as it requires custom solutions depending on the specific platform and client in question.

Search Functionality: We use ‘Elasticsearch’ as our file management portal’s search tool. We make the elasticsearch tool ingest user data, file metadata and file content to help with indexing using JSON directories and making the search tool more efficient. This is some of the same data we feed to web3.storage after editing the CAR.

Deliverable and Development Roadmap (Updated)

1. Initial Filecoin research
   • Number of team members: 2
   • Cost: $2000
   • Completed: September, 2020
2. Build website for file management
   • Number of team members: 2
   • Cost: $22,000
   • Completed: March, 2021
3. Integrate with IPFS (private network)
   • Number of team members: 2
   • Cost: $7,000
   • Completed: April, 2021
4. Integrate with Web3.Storage
   • Number of team members: 1
   • Cost: $1500
   • Completed: April, 2021 4.1 Delete Files Automation
   • Number of team members: 1
   • Cost: $500
   • Completed: April 2021

Total Budget Requested (Updated)

Requested Budget from Filecoin Open Grant: $32,500

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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

LinkedIn

https://www.linkedin.com/in/zaheeral/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/zainzaidi99/

Team Website:

https://www.transcrypts.com/

Media:

Tweet by Mark Cuban about our Medical work:

https://i.imgur.com/YeVbFOy.png

Zain Zaidi Featured as BayArea Inno 25 under 25:

https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/inno/stories/inno-insights/2021/09/16/zain-zaidi-transcrypts-bay-area-inno.html

TransCrypt Winners of the $50,000 Prize at Rice Business Competition:

https://news.rice.edu/news/2022/semiconductor-technology-startup-wins-2022-rice-business-plan-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:

https://www.techstars.com/the-line/startup-profile/this-isnt-just-my-first-company-but-my-first-real-job

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.

[ErinOCon]

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?

[ErinOCon]

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.

[AliTranscrypts]

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

[ErinOCon]

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?

[ErinOCon]

Hi @AliTranscrypts, I hope you are doing well! Do you have any concerns or questions regarding the proposed update?

[AliTranscrypts]

Hi @ErinOCon , we should have a new proposal for your review in a few days.

Thanks, Ali

[realChainLife]

Hi @AliTranscrypts let us know if you need any assistance on the proposal rework. Otherwise we're looking forward to your next update.

[ErinOCon]

Hi @AliTranscrypts, I hope you are doing well! Do you expect an update will be available by next week?

[AliTranscrypts]

@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.

[ErinOCon]

Thanks, @AliTranscrypts! We will continue our review once these updates are provided.

[AliTranscrypts]

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

[ErinOCon]

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!