On-chain and off-chain storage

Any Product on the DIP has a choice of:

  • what type of data to store
  • where to store data

The DIP storage model allows products contracts to store its data on:

  • blockchain smart contracts
  • a platform database
  • a product database

Note

Payment card data should be stored on a payment provider level as it requires PCI compliance to store payment card data of customers in a database.

In many countries, a legal agreement is needed between a party that runs a storage service and a party that uses a storage service.

On-chain

As the DIP operates in the Ethereum environment, the term on-chain specifies smart contracts, where a product can store risk description and specific metadata per policy.

The key principle of how the DIP itself uses data is that no personal data is kept in smart contracts — only unique hashed references.

The DIP allows to store data for any product regarding its:

  • customers (Note: first_name, last_name, and e-mail fields are required by the GIF.)
  • policies
  • claims

In case a product doesn’t want to use a platform database, it is possible to use the product’s database.

Attention

According to the EU General Data Protection Regulation requirements, we prevent you from storing personal data of customers on-chain. This data is to be stored off-chain only. There exist special identificators stored on-chain (hashed data references), which allow for retrieving data from an off-chain database. This prevents unauthorized access to sensitive data by an on-chain identificator. The diagram below illustrates the relations between on-chain and off-chain storage. This methodology implements the “Positionspapier des Bundesblock,” the german association of blockchain companies which tries to implement this methodology in EU law.

general data protection requirements

Profiling

To avoid the possibility of the so-called customer “profiling,” each newly issued policy gets a new unique customer ID (unique hashed reference).

Make Payouts

In order to make payouts, a product contract can use the GIF Payout microservice. A product contract has two possible ways to be informed about the payout needed.

In the first way, a product contract can sign up to the statusChanged event from a policy storage to be notified when a payout is needed. The microservice gets a message from a smart contract and sends it to a product application, which needs to provide a payout.

The second way implies that a product contract can sign up to the Event Listener and read events about its contracts.

The GIF Payout microservice doesn’t have any business logic implementation regarding where to transfer payout funds and which way (transferring to a bank account, payment cards, a transferwise, paypal accounts, coin wallets, post transfers, etc.). This business logic could be implemented by a product contract.

Below, you will find an example of a payout event, which has to be sent by a product contract.

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 {
 policyId: 1,
 payoutAmount: 100,
 currency: 'EUR',
 provider: 'transferwise',
 }