Polkassembly - On-chain Power of Attorney: case study in the Polkadot ecosystem from a legal perspective. #1901

On-chain Power of Attorney: case study in the Polkadot ecosystem from a legal perspective.

3 years ago

I while back I started preparing a proposal for writing 3 articles within the broader topic of privacy preserving legal transformation in Polkadot. You can find the previous proposal here. I had sought feedback via the Kusama Direction channel back then and the topic of Power of Attorney (PoA) was a clear favorite. Therefore, I have now decided to pursue that topic specifically.

To reinforce that, I got feedback from the community members that as a first step to win the community's trust and prove added value, it might be better to focus on a smaller funding amount and as such limit the proposal to just one article. That's exactly my plan now.

Finally, I've been told that by limiting the scope of research to the Swiss law only, the impact for the community might be reduced. As such, I've decided to expand the scope and focus on building a general legal framework to regulate on-chain PoA. The authorities (especially in Europe) will face the same types of challenges when dealing with digitising the legal system and I aim to provide a framework and guidelines for addressing these issues from first principles (both legal and technological). In order to ground my research in a practical environment and not just theoretical constructs, I will use the Swiss juridical system to provide examples where appropriate.

You can find the full proposal on my GitHub. Below is the summary of the topic and as always, feedback is very welcome:

On-chain Power of Attorney: challenges and promises for a legal system.

How is PoA currently enforced in EU & Switzerland, who benefits from it and who can abuse it?
Private key ?= full access revisited: a need for additional, trusted verification (or else take all my money).
A partially government-controlled blockchain - pros and cons. Could a parachain be the solution?
Encrypted 'allow-revoke' mechanism, revealable only to selected parties, by the means of substrate chain and a user-friendly app.

Comments (2)

3 years ago

Oh, that's a very interesting and complex topic to cover.
On that note, I think it might be worth liaising with the team behind logion blockchain, since they operate with real-life law professionals as node operators.

3 years ago

I asked couple of questions, got more insights and clarification

How cryptography could help overcome privacy concerns in gene-sequencing: using zero-knowledge and encrypted computation for secure gene analysis with the help of a zero-knowledge parachain on Polkadot.

reply by OP/Julia

In the end this topic won't be part of my proposal (at least for the first round!), but sure let me provide a quick summary:
Currently if you wish to have your genome analysed, you need to submit a sample to a private company which would do the biological analysis (see which genes are encoded), as well as a statistical analysis (what these encoded genes say about your health, ancestry etc.). In theory, one could do the two steps by different parties: you use a specialized service for a biological analysis, but the statistical comparison would happen later, and only on encrypted data (e.g. using homomorphic encryption), and a proof of correct execution of that computation is posted on-chain. There's many varieties to explore there, such as auctioning off the analysis or even running the whole analysis on-chain (less practical for now until homomorphic encryption tech improves). This is definitely a topic I'd like to pursue in a follow up proposal, after the more down-to-earth Power of Attorney research is done :)

more details and background https://github.com/legal-julia/power-of-attorney-on-polkadot

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