A path towards non-custodial portfolio management

That was the question that the Portex team set out to solve recently at EthDenver. They recently published a blog post detailing their project results.

Read Portex's full blog post here https://blog.consensolabs.com/portex-textile-thread/

After a week of hacking, their solution was a slick application that combines Textile Threads, IPFS, and IDX in a simple but exciting way. The drivers for them to build with this stack were nice and clear.

- Similar user authentication strategy as Ceramic identity wallet
- Interoperable user identity across ThreadDB and IDX
- Inexpensive writes when compared to writing it to the blockchain itself
- Faster reads when compared to reading transactions from the blockchain

By combining the technology with that in mind, they were able to generate a really straight-forward data flow within their application.

...encrypted data are maintained on the user document and the secret to decrypt the document is exchanged upon approval. Although we wanted to include most of the user portfolio information on the user-owned Ceramic document, we knew that we needed a mechanism to exchange the requests and information for the counterparty to decode the portfolio. This is where we went in search of decentralized storage solutions. Turns out Textile ThreadDB is what we were looking for as it acts like an open database that user can read and write to without relying on some service to hold and manage the data.

From here, the Portex team was able to layer on some nice features for permissions-based sharing and access granting. This allows one portfolio holder to choose who to show it to.

The counterparty user for whom the request has been made can accept or reject them. If accepted, a confidential key that can only be only unlocked by the counterparty along with a few other information is added to the user’s entry.

We love the ideas in Portex and are excited to see if they can be developed further now that the hackathon is over. Read the full blog post here and follow the team who built it (twitter, repo).