Pillar Project’s (PLR) Drew Harding explains how the token wallet protects privacy
Pillar Project's (PLR) token wallet aims to decentralise your personal information so you can have more control over it and protect your privacy
Interview from Blockchain Week London on 23 January 2018.
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Read the transcript:
My name is Drew Harding. I work for the product team at Pillar Project.
What does Pillar Project do?
Pillar Project is a cryptocurrency wallet designed to give individuals ownership of their personal information and control over their personal data. It will empower them to interact with services in a truly decentralised format versus the kind of centralised digital marketplaces and services that exist currently on the net.
What problems are you solving that other people aren't?
Our mission is to build the best cryptocurrency wallet but our true purpose is to empower individuals through blockchain and decentralised technologies.
A wallet is obviously traditionally known for management of crypto assets. Our real goal is to also make that a place for users to store, maintain and decide what aspects of their personal data information they want to share with other individuals or other services that they may have subscriptions to, or some sort of need from.
What makes you and this wallet that you're developing unique?
Probably it's best to give a real-life use case. In our wallet, there will be third-party services offered so that individuals can engage with everything from an ICO marketplace, to your dentist, to the pizza delivery place. And each one of these services requires a bit of information, more or less, depending on the services they're trying to provide. If you're waiting on a quote back from your dentist you may have to share some health records with them, but your pizza guy doesn't need those things.
What our wallet is designed to do is allow a user to toggle on and off at their whim what is shared and when. So instead of the current model where you have an account with any number of centralized services – could be Dropbox, Amazon, a content site, Netflix – you actually retain all that personal information, instead of them being your custodian of that information. You can just send a simple hash validating that you have paid your subscription that you are the person that you're saying you are, enough so that that service can release access.
At that point, depending on the need – say a pizza delivery place for instance – after the pizzas have been delivered they obviously no longer need your address. So you could then take that information back or choose to no longer share it with them. It really kind of flips the model on its head, instead of them storing your personal information.
And having a multitude of accounts with various services and centralized servers you retain all that information. You just share enough at the right time, as needed, in order to again grant access to that particular service.
And what stage are you? Are you developing? Are you testing? Have you gone live?
We had a very successful ICO last August. We raised about 20 million dollars – 25 million dollars with the appreciation in the price of Ether that has obviously gone up substantially. We are in product development and we're looking to release our first kind of product beta product by the end of Q1 2018.
You'll then have people testing?
Correct – users, yes. We're doing internal testing of our own now but, yes, that would be at the point when the public would be invited to come beta test.
And what will be in it for them? What rewards are you offering for people, particularly during the beta stage?
Other than the ability to take back control of your own data which is a big deal for a lot of people, especially those of us in the crypto space, those of evangelizing this movement, I think it's going to be a much easier, more intuitive way for asset management, also for communication with other individuals.
We'll have a messaging and chat platform or service built in on top of the wallet as well. Wallet is the nomenclature, the word used most easily to describe kind of project that we're building, but it's really better thought of as a platform or an ecosystem. We'd love for it to evolve into a complete operating system where we're running on our own hardware.
