1. Is Gateway building its own blockchain and storage network?

    • Yes, Gateway is building its own Layer 1 (L1) blockchain and storage network bootstrapping nodes to store encrypted data in the novel Encrypted Data Vaults (EDVs).

  2. Where is the user’s private key stored?

    • We encourage the keys to be held directly at the user level, the protocol requires the user to hold their signing key and encryption keys.
    • As of right now (devnet), Gateway is facilitating the process. However, in a later stage, this will be required, though it’s easy to manage that with the integration of the SDK.

  3. Is it necessary to integrate the wallet SDK, just like integrating MetaMask in the app?

    • No, it’s not necessary to integrate with Gateway’s SDK. If your app already has a wallet connection, you can integrate with just the API to start contributing data and leveraging the Gateway Protocol’s features.

  4. How is the User Data Stored?

    • Gateway is building its own storage network, bootstrapping nodes to store encrypted data in novel Encrypted Data Vaults (EDVs). This is why Gateway is its own L1 (Layer 1) blockchain.
    • The data is sharded with erasure coding (for parity/retrieval with minimal overhead) and stored across multiple nodes in the EDV network.

  5. Is the data ever decrypted?

    • The data is encrypted as soon as the data asset is issued. It’s part of the creation process. At all times, the data is fully encrypted. Only the data owner can decrypt the data which is a process that happens entirely on the client-side.

  6. How does the encryption process work in Gateway?

    • The way data is encrypted on Gateway is through enveloped encryption: a random, unique symmetric key (one-time encryption mask) is generated to encrypt the data itself, and said one-time mask is then encrypted with the asymmetric key the data owner is holding (right now through Gateway’s services, later on the wallet).