Shyft Network is a data attestation layer.

Trust Anchors are first-party services and data custodians. They are regarded as trusted entities, and hold data that is highly regulated i.e. "hard" data. Trust Anchors receive data from Data Owners, and maintain, review, read, write, confirm, and attest to this data’s validity and existence on behalf of Data Owners, with the consent of Data Owners, formulating the basis for digital identity. Trust Anchors are usually regulated entities, and are held responsible for their attestations, formulating the basis for cumulative credibility and reputations. Each Trust Anchor sets their own rules and is fully interoperable with other actors in the Shyft ecosystem.

By abstracting the roles of "hard" data holders, Shyft is assisting in creating the next generation of economic and systemic stability for data rights, centered on the individuals themselves.

Examples: Financial institutions, cryptocurrency exchanges, regulatory bodies, social media networks.

Data Owners are individuals or entities that sign up for a service with a Trust Anchor or Data Consumer. These parties have the authentication-based right to control, share, and revoke private data. They maintain control of their data via private keys, to which only they have access, and have the ability to grant access to their data via Shyft’s consent-based framework. Data Owners are incentivized via the network for the sharing of their data. By expanding users’ rights over their data, Shyft aims to enable the next generation of quality data markets, in a secure trusted manner, exposing only those attributes on public blockchains that the users directly consent to - no private data is held on the public blockchains, only references to where their data resides.

Examples: Enterprise clients of financial institutions, and individual customers of financial institutions

Data Consumers are third-party services that do not custody “hard data” and are not regarded as fully-trusted parties. These parties custody and commit “soft” data to the network, providing context to “hard” user data and network activity. Data Consumers will offer Data Owners pre-approved services that require attestations of trusted data. When they request information from the network, they pay a small fee to the Data Owners and Trust Anchors in exchange for the attested information. By expanding the data marketplace in this way, Shyft enables new consumer and business opportunities across the entirety of the identity ecosystem.

Examples: APIs and applications

The Shyft Ring is the public-facing blockchain-enabled software for global consensus, the base of which functions exactly like the Ethereum network, using a fork of the codebase with Shyft specific extensions. The Shyft Ring participants are nodes running on code based on trusted open-source, battle-hardened code, and Shyft enables extensions to benefit the whole blockchain and cryptocurrency ecosystem. Shyft Ring participants are necessarily validators for the entire state of the network, acting as local connection nodes for non-full-node users, and completing PoW hashes to propagate blocks and establish security. These validators are incentivized according to the workload distribution necessary for optimal efficiency of the Shyft Network.