The DecentraTech Collective, an open community with a common focus on accelerating the understanding, development and adoption of decentralization technologies, spins off from Austin Blockchain Collective. and is now an independent organization.
DecentraTech – short for decentralization technology – underpins the implementation of decentralized business. It comprises a set of innovations, including blockchain, cryptographic proofs, peer-to-peer messaging, decentralized storage, edge and serverless computing, as well as Web 3.0 concepts such as self-sovereign identity. The DecentraTech Collective has defined a Decentra Tech Stack to encompass technologies appropriate to decentralization, and their roles in enabling it.
Interest in decentralized business models has accelerated in recent years, driven by an increasing and palpable belief that traditional centralized approaches, as typified by the business models of Big Tech companies, are increasingly detrimental to individuals’ rights and freedoms. Recent controversies related to the censorship of political leaders on Twitter and the exploitation of personal information by Facebook and Google are examples of the perils of centralized control.
“As with FinTech, MarTech and RegTech, we expect DecentraTech to be adopted as a shorthand term among innovators looking to lead businesses toward decentralized models,” says Peter Harris, Executive Director of the DecentraTech Collective. “With a global outlook that has been accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic’s shift to remote work, the DecentraTech Collective will work with a roster of world-class partners to provide both education and practical advocacy initiatives to accelerate the journey to a decentralized future.”
The DecentraTech Collective will initially work with innovators in the Decentralized Finance (DeFi) and Decentralized Healthcare (DeHealth) spaces. It will also support technology innovation for decentralization in artificial intelligence, supply chain, business commerce and ESG projects. As well as working with corporations, startups, investors and educational establishments, it will support open-source projects that show promise as DecentraTech building blocks.
Three specific activities that are already underway at the DecentraTech Collective are:
- Publication of ongoing research related to how blockchain and related technologies are being leveraged in industry responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.
- Promotion of the open-source Baseline Protocol initiative, which enables secure and private business processes at low cost via the public Ethereum blockchain.
- Championing the adoption for multiple use cases of MyPass, an open-source codebase originally developed by the City of Austin to provide a secure online document repository for those experiencing homelessness.
