Into The Interchain with Shade Protocol + Serenity Shield

The Serenity Shield team began coalescing a little over a year ago, bringing in like minded individuals with a passion for technology that empowered self-sovereignty, trust, freedom of expression, access for all, and the ability to personally grow alongside the industry. Upon discovering Secret Network, the Serenity Shield began building the base infrastructure to support not only their own ambitions but also the ambitions of other builders within the space that wanted to leverage the privacy preservation capabilities of Secret smart contracts.

The first product built by Serenity Shield is StrongBox. StrongBox allows users to self-custody the future of their assets in a safe and reliable fashion, in regards to end of life planning. By utilizing Secret NFTs, users are able to store their private keys on chain within the private metadata of an sNFT and choose a nominee to “assume control” over their digital assets in the event of death. Even more interesting, the Serenity Shield team stated that “anything that can be digitized and put on chain can also be passed down on chain as well”, opening up a wide array of potential use cases and product market fit for their application. By using this solution, users are able to take greater control over their financial freedom and decision making regarding asset management. The goal for StrongBox is to not only empower the self-custody of assets and financial freedom, but also to push the boundaries of simplicity and ease of use when interacting with blockchain applications.

At no point does Serenity Shield have access to any keys or data input into the strongboxes and the Serenity Shield team has put in place extra measures to prevent users from sharing accidentally, or losing access to their data in a worst case scenario event.. Additionally, Strongbox utilizes a variety of push notifications, alerts, and activity analysis to assess and verify if a user has passed, in order to minimize the chance of accidental transfer of asset access. Due to the unique properties of Secret smart contracts, the input and outputs of contract interactions are encrypted and thus provide the privacy required to empower this financial planning solution.

The teams talked about the role of education in the blockchain industry and how important it is for all tiers of users and builders to contribute to the broader education surrounding blockchain technology. There exists massive global inequality relating to access to financial systems, and it is the duty of those with the knowledge and access to help lessen the barrier to entry for those in disadvantaged groups. We need to seek global expansion of the basic infrastructure required to provide these critical financial services, while simultaneously educating about the relationships between centralized entities such as governments and banks.

Even within wealthy jurisdictions, there is a monumental ignorance within the general public about how blockchain technologies work and how the public can benefit from them. It is our duty, as builders and supporters of this tech, to push education so that those looking to wield it for good don’t get pushed out by those looking to take control for negative reasons. We as humans have become commodities, and with that comes constant surveillance from both businesses and governments. As a result, we need to adopt decentralized solutions to provide greater protection surrounding personal information.

The Serenity Shield team talked about their short and long term goals within this space as well and gave some good insight into what is driving their development goals and timelines. Both the Shade Protocol team and Serenity Shield team strive to build products they would personally use and the focus of their development is very user centric as a result. Within Q1 of 2023, the StrongBox will be launched on Mainnet, and during that time the Serenity Shield team will be working on securing partnerships with other products, teams, and infrastructure services. The collaboration potential with Serenity Shield is quite large, as there are existing industries and services that could immediately be improved through the utilization of StrongBox such as assisting legal attorneys and counsel, MSPs, B2B solutions, insurance and financial planning.

In the long term, the Serenity Shield hopes to remove single points of failure within their products as well as other products seeking collaboration. One interesting example of this is providing groups the ability to pass information along with a track record that can be shut off when the access should no longer be there, ultimately providing better control access to sensitive information.

Towards the end of the Twitter Space, Shade Protocol and Serenity Shield teams discussed the importance of collaboration in this space, and how individualism is a massive growth constraint. Both teams realize the importance of providing holistic support and services to their user bases, and share the commonalities of plans to provide arrays of applications that all work together and build off each other, respectively. One of the benefits of collaboration that is often overlooked is the ability to coordinate education efforts, including providing accountability and transparency. The future is bright for teams dedicated to building innovative products and services even in the worst of conditions, and there exists a great potential for collaboration and success between our teams.

“We both believe that Privacy, whether corporeal or digital, is a Human Right, and we’ll continue building to ensure this future.”

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