UNITY

The right way to monetize your enterprise data

Product

COVA Unity is a blockchain protocol that allows the monetization of enterprise data without compromising user data privacy.

How does it work?

Start with data from multiple sources

Among the most valuable assets of an organization is data. Over 90% of data produced in the world today remains locked up in data silos due to concerns about privacy. Enter the COVA Unity platform. The COVA Unity platform integrates with existing databases seamlessly, only requiring a specific form of encryption and an open network connection.

Create the right data policy

Once the database is encrypted and connected, a programmatic data usage policy needs to be created to express access rules. Complex access rules can be expressed programmatically. As a starting example, a statistics-only policy can be created such that user-level information are censored while high level statistics are allowed to be extracted.

Open up data access

Requests from 3rd party users are automatically checked against the specified data usage policy before they are allowed access. With the COVA platform, enterprise data are maximally freed from their confinement, all without compromising user data privacy.

Technology

Blockchain

A permissioned blockchain system is used to allow performant communication between components of the platform and to allow affordable micro-transactions. Public blockchains such as Ethereum and Binance Chain are used as the financial settlement ledger.

TEE

Powering the COVA Unity platform is a substrate of TEE nodes that run COVA software, and provide the horsepower of secured and trusted execution. All data and code that is processed by the COVA network are securely pieced together, hidden and protected inside an enclave.

Data Policy

Programmatic data policies bridges semantic notions from natural language to machine-enforceable policy code. They provide data owners with a new tool in their arsenal to prevent their precious data from being abused.

Shared Infrastructure

The COVA Unity platform provides the computing infrastructure. This design eliminates the need for enterprises to acquire extensive expertise in blockchain or TEE technologies, and makes the integration process painless and maintenance process unnecessary.

Case Studies

Healthcare

Data sharing between medical institution would accelerate the development of new drugs, new treatments, and basic scientific research. However, data repositories such as hospitals are currently unable to share useful data without breaching patient privacy. COVA Unity is a tool for hospital administrators and chief physicians to share their data with third party research and commercial organizations while offering full protection of their patient privacy.

Social Media

Social media companies have recently come under increasing scrutiny for infringing upon user privacy. Millions of data entries, meant for academic research, could end up in the hands of malicious actors. These companies can prevent further scandals by deploying COVA Unity. A COVA Unity data usage policy could be written that only allows sanctioned operations to be performed on this data, and effectively prevents misuage by malicious actors.

Retail

Since the invention of recommendation engine, e-commerce sites have collected extensive user browsing data through cookies, and have collaborated with other entities through cross-site tracking. These data are successfully converted into targeted advertisement that has become an indispensable booster of revenue. However, online users are increasingly wary of sharing their browsing and financial information, and many have called for new regulations on how their data can be collected and used. COVA Unity can help e-commerce sites maintain the current state of effective data collection and cross-sharing while protecting granular-level consumer information.

Law Enforcement

Government surveillance program has grown to an unacceptable scale by collecting comprehensive data on all of its citizens. This does not have to be the case. With COVA Unity, law enforcement agencies can collect statistical data on its citizens in order to monitor any suspicious behavior, and only when there is a strong enough incriminating evidence will the government identify specific user-level information. This paradigm enables a privacy-respecting surveillance program that enhances both national security and citizen privacy.

About

Core Team

COVA’s team comes from Harvard, Princeton, University of Munich, Heidelberg University, Peking University, Google, Linkedin, Citadel, Linux and Thumbtack. COVA is headquartered in Singapore, with satellite offices in San Francisco and Germany.

Investors

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