Inside Pawtocol: The Next Generation Technology Fueling the Pet Industry.

6 min readDec 21, 2019

What is Pawtocol?

Pawtocol is a global online community of pet lovers who are disrupting the $100B+ pet industry with a next-gen ecosystem that benefits all participants in space, from pets to vets and retailers to researchers. By combining blockchain, AI, and IoT technologies, the Pawtocol platform will allow all participants to make better use of the vast amount of data generated within the space, all while retaining custody and control of their information. Pet parents will earn income by sharing reliable data with interested buyers in a secure marketplace who can then use that data to improve the products and services they deliver to pets. All of this is made possible by combining Blockchain, AI, and IoT technologies with privacy-centric design principles.

Why DLT?

Distributed Ledger Technology is being used in everything from gaming to government projects, so it’s reasonable to question whether each of these applications is truly justified or it’s simply an attempt to cash in on the hype. At its core, Pawtocol’s mission is to improve the lives of pets and their parents and to do so while maintaining unprecedented levels of trust, privacy, and custody (e.g., ownership). DLT is particularly aligned with these values:

Open consensus verification creates far greater trust
Advanced encryption enables strong privacy controls
Immutability allows for more reliable custody solutions

What are the specific problems Pawtocol’s tech solves?

The Universal Pet Income (UPI) token and Pawtocol’s smart contracts make transactions safer and more rewarding.

Since UPI can be both earned and spent natively within the platform, getting whatever your pet needs just got a whole lot easier. Everything from vet bills to treats can change hands with just a few clicks. What’s more, much of pet-related commerce is conducted person to person (P2P), which often involves risks, such as to one’s privacy or simply of non-payment. As you’ll read below, Pawtocol’s technology allows users to engage one another without having to reveal identifying details — helping pet parents manage their privacy — and our smart contracts help to safeguard and streamline P2P transactions — for example, by automatically triggering payments when services are rendered.

Earn UPI and buy verified Pawtocol crowdsourced goods and services for your pet.

2. Artificial Intelligence (AI) drives relevant product recommendations and improves healthcare.

Pawtocol’s AI will make data-driven pet care recommendations by performing a pet-specific assessment drawing from personal data, existing databases, and community supplied correlations. Pet parents will benefit from recommendations for everything from new local products to treatment regimen reminders. More importantly, unlike a centralized AI, where the user’s data is part of a single massive dataset, each pet has their own personal AI that caters only to them, ensuring privacy for and custody of their personal information.

Quick and easy information about what products are good for your pet.

3. Internet of Things (IoT) devices make connecting with the platform seamless.

One of the most significant impediments to the proliferation of DLT lies in connecting the blockchain with the rest of the world. Despite our present digital age, much of what we do for and with our pets rests squarely in an analog setting. Even if it doesn’t, odds are it still involves an arcane, centralized infrastructure. This leads to a gap that nearly every blockchain project must bridge to enable mass adoption. That gap is an opening for errors (i.e., incorrect data could be submitted) and for inefficiency (i.e., a person needs to perform a manual action in order to proceed).

Pawtocol will launch a variety of IoT-enabled devices to make this process effortless, but it all starts with our Blockchain Dog Tag. Our first version is already available and relies on a simple QR code to get started. Soon, a second generation tag utilizing a thin-film, flexible electronic circuit to enable battery-less bluetooth connectivity will open up vast, new possibilities. What’s more, research has already begun on several instruments with applications in medical diagnostics and food safety.

The Blockchain Dog Tag is the first step towards your Pawtocol lifestyle.

4. Zero Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) preclude users from having to choose between functionality and privacy.

Zero knowledge proofs have been around since the early 90s, but were generally relegated to the annals of academia and small groups of cryptographers. The growing popularity of DLT is forcing this abstract concept into tech discourse more broadly, but it’s mechanics remain extremely opaque. On the other hand, its utility within the Pawtocol platform is remarkably straightforward: it allows pet parents to decide precisely what information will be visible to others, even while interacting with and on the platform. That’s because, in lay terms, protocols that use zero knowledge proofs enable one user to prove to another user that they have a piece of information, without saying what the information is or who they are.

Creating profiles and sharing information is discretionary.

Here’s an extremely oversimplified explanation of how ZKPs work:

Imagine a dog named Lady and a cat named Snowball, both grossly anthropomorphized, that want to know if they get the same number of treats, but neither wants to share exactly how many they actually get. Neither have gluttonous parents, so everyone knows the number won’t exceed 3, and both have been trained to recognize a tag with a mark on it versus one without as a special signal.

Step 1: Lady trots in first. She sees four special, locked pet crates each with a key, marked ‘0’, ‘1’, ‘2’ and ‘3’. Since she gets two treats per day. She keeps the key marked ‘2’, then promptly devours the other three keys, destroying all but key marked ‘2’.

Step 2: Snowball saunters in next, carrying four blank dog tags with him. He then carefully extends one of his six toes to puncture just one of these tags. Since he gets three treats per day, he slips the pierced tag into the crate marked ‘3’, and slips one blank tag in each of the other crates. And of course, all the keys are gone so he can’t open any of the crates while he’s in there.

Step 3: When Lady comes back, since fragments of the other keys are making their way through her digestive tract she can only unlock the crate marked ‘2’. She opens it to find one blank dog tag. This tells her that her playmate does not get two treats, but nothing more (e.g., who she’s playing with or if the true amount is more or less than two)

To be clear, blockchains don’t have dogs and cats performing ZKPs inside them. But this simple example illustrates a critical benefit of a ZKP: valuable information can be exchanged between parties in near-complete privacy.

5. Distributed Encrypted Storage (DES) delivers secure, high-availability access to a user’s data.

Unlike ZKPs, Distributed Encrypted Storage is far easier to understand, both its operation and its benefits. DES is a method of saving encrypted data across a network instead of on a single disk. Pawtocol uses a specific form of DES called the Interplanetary File System. IPFS is a popular file sharing protocol that requires a file to be encrypted then stored on a network with a pointer allowing for the future retrieval of the file. By encrypting the data we protect it from hackers and by storing it across a network we make it accessible without the risks of a centralized service. For Pawtocol’s pet parents, this means their data is safe and accessible no matter who they’re interacting with, how they’re doing it, or where they’re doing it from.