Nautilus

Nautilus helps users create digital rights tokens to give them the ability to license the use of their private data without loss of privacy

Over the past two decades, data has become a major factor across basically all industries and the digital economy has grown faster than the real economy every year in the past twenty years. However, our current information paradigm facilitates the centralization of control over data by big tech companies and other data aggregators. Data, in particular the most valuable data in healthcare and finance remains siloed, inaccessible, and under-utilized. Consequently, estimates are that less than 1% of the available data in the world is actually used.

At the heart of the problem is the inability of users to combine sensitive data and allow third parties to analyze combined data pools without loss of privacy. There are only few options of how to execute arbitrary code over encrypted data. Among them is the use of trusted execution environments (TEEs). Recent developments over the past 12-18 months have seen a tremendous increase in the ability of TEEs to handle large datasets effectively.

Nautilus uses a combination of blockchain and trusted execution environments to allow groups of users to pool their sensitive data without loss of privacy. We use blockchain to enable users to issue Digital Rights Tokens (DRTs) which include the right to execute a specific piece of code over the encrypted combined data. These DRTs can be sold by the group of users to third-party data analysts who can redeem the DRT on the Nautilus platform and obtain the result of the code execution. The proceeds from the sale of DRTs are shared among users who contributed to a data pool. Our combination of TEEs and blockchain allows us to provide new functionality to users which empowers them to not only be data creators, but actually become data owners.