Cere FAQ

Cere Network is part of the consortium of projects from Polkadot and Cosmos, united by the vision of cross-chain interoperability (cross communications) between blockchain networks and serve the purpose of a trustless, and scalable global decentralized ecosystem for all businesses and consumers.

Cere Network offers the world’s first Customer Relation Management (CRM) blockchain ecosystem in a Decentralized Data Cloud (DDC) optimized for service data integration and data collaboration, built on the scalable and heterogeneous platform of Polkadot.

This DDC allows stakeholders to own and manage their data with full custody, making it the first platform that gives them 100% control over any data use or deployment.

Enterprises now have the opportunity to easily plug-in their existing applications and power of contextually relevant data, insights, and predictive analytics in real-time to supercharge their value streams via DDC.

Cere’s approach towards enterprise data holds similarities with successful cloud data platform Snowflake in providing direct access to first-party customer data. Cere takes this new narrative a step further through anonymizing and encrypting (individual-level) customer data through blockchain, which in turn can be exchanged with business partners and analyzed on Cere’s open and on-demand data marketplaces.

Cere makes data directly accessible in near real-time by all business units, partners/vendors, and machine-learning processes. This in turn enables secure and private data collaborations through Cere’s Open Data Marketplace (ODM) which is free from any traditional vendor lock-ins used by organizations like Salesforce, Oracle & Adobe.

Cere’s DDC is an intelligent data warehousing tool that captures customer sessions into a secure complete customer journey, creating a source of truth that can be extracted, transformed, and loaded (ETL’d) into application-specific data views.

Cere’s DDC allows enterprises to start with establishing their own data ecosystems and first-party data strategies.

Cere achieves this by providing full custody to stakeholders, in their ecosystems, giving them 100% control over who can control and use their data for what purpose in any particular context.

Multiple applications and use cases are built on top of the DDC. To get more extensive information about these features, please refer to question #5.

Cere’s vision is to lead blockchain adoption for enterprises by using their own, unleashed customer data.

Cere is the missing link for enterprises to successfully realize blockchain adoption. Cere offers fully integrated data solutions, aligned with the currently used SaaS platforms in the CRM marketplaces.

Cere is deployed to bring immediate efficiency optimizations and cost savings in core business processes. The plug-and-play onboarding process of Cere is designed for fluent implementation in the existing systems of enterprises, it enhances the power of contextually relevant data insights, and predictive analytics in real-time to supercharge the enterprise value streams via the DDC.

It establishes a secure first-party data foundation in the cloud by using blockchain identity and data encryption to onboard and segment individual consumer data.

The implementation of Cere ignores traditional high start-up costs and set-up time while allowing enterprises the opportunity to go beyond their current data solutions with complete data ownership.

Blockchain application brings trust, accountability, and transparency to digital transactions. The technology creates and maintains cryptographically secure, shared, and distributed ledger for transactions

Cere uses its blockchain technology for the following concrete purposes:

• Cere abstracts the identity of each user across all apps/sites by using a drop-in blockchain wallet.
• If an individual is cryptographically signed, verified, and encrypted, the first-party data will be stored and the start of a tailored segmented customer journey is realized. Each user session will be locked in the Interplanetary Linked Data (IPLD) in the data structure of IPFS, subsequently, the verifiable data hash is locked into blockchain transactions. These data blocks can not be influenced or be changed, making each customer journey a reliable source of truth.
• This process allows Cere’s AI agents to optimize and automate personalized data-driven smart user engagement decisions, which include value transfers such as discounts, vouchers, and rewards that are aligned in the customer journey of every individual. This leaves an immutable, reliable, and coherent ledger of paper trailing for every individual, which makes it possible to apply and extend plug-and-play implementations and automated solutions, with minimum integrations as opposed to going with the traditional approach of integrating with layers of API's to update critical and sensitive user status/attributes in legacy data systems of the client enterprises.
• The data ownership is fully guaranteed to the app and users in Cere’s DDC, as their data is stored fully encrypted and accessible only with the app/user signatures.

1. Open Decentralized Data Marketplace (ODM)

Cere disrupts a multi-billion dollar data analysis industry through its ODM.

The Cere ODM is the service layer of the Cere Ecosystem through which businesses hire and make their data available to data experts. Businesses can request information on or analysis of the data they make available in the marketplace from their DDC.

The key advantage provided by the ODM is that the user data provided by the business is already enriched, filtered, anonymized, and prepared for processing by the data expert who can access the data directly. The ODM is designed to overcome the hassle of hiring data experts and executing data analysis. The current process of sourcing, vetting, and hiring a trusted data expert is complex. Often leading to the longer cycle of setting up an environment and extracting data from walled-gardens for the data expert to use in a data delivering service.

2. Business Specific Sub Networks (BSSN)

Cere Network provides a turn-key private and stand-alone blockchain network that can be readily integrated by any enterprise.

Since it’s built with Substrate, this network can be integrated into any Polkadot/Substrate based Layer 1 network to serve as a secondary chain.

This turn-key network intends to abstract the implementation complexity for businesses, as well as providing a ready-made package to optimize for a higher level of security, privacy, and performance, and to serve as a template or base-implementation of a highly customizable and performant enterprise-specific blockchain network. Furthermore, any network built from or derived from a Cere turn-key blockchain solution will also be able to use derivative assets to represent real-world value transfers on-chain (e.g. micropayments, discount vouchers, loyalty points, etc), as well as being able to programmatically issue these assets between user and application wallets.

Cere turn-key blockchain solution projects will support:

• A set of turn-key Substrate based packaging and tools that simplifies the customization, configuration, testing, and deployment of such a blockchain network.
• Pre-built solutions to create/assign/transfer derivative assets in business to consumer use cases.
• Pre-configured and optimized for feeless transactions and performance.
• Creation of custom derivative assets and automate the transfer to/from user wallets to app wallets by any/app brand.
• Optimization of batch user onboarding and transaction processing for higher throughput situations needed for consumer apps/sites.

For these business-specific sub-networks, Cere has received a Web3 Foundation grant. More info on this grant can be found here.

Cere Network will be supporting NFT’s (non-fungible tokens) that can represent unique or fractionalized ownership of real-world or digital assets for business and applications. The DDC offers a set of plug-and-play utilities that can be extended to any other NFT compatible network as well.

Cere uniquely captures the critical event data relating to the issuance, transfers, and access of such tokens, ensuring that the state changes of the NFT are captured both on-chain and in the DDC, both going through network consensus at the same time. This allows for fully automated verifications and value-transfer via smart contracts and workflow software to capture much more information and utility.

By connecting the corporate cash flow and assets that have already been on-boarded onto the Cere SaaS platform to the rapidly growing DeFi landscape, Cere SaaS-DeFi enables enterprises to better utilize their sidelined capital, optimize their financial operations, create frictionless payment experiences for their customer base, and tap into the supercharged liquidity of DeFi.

The Cere ecosystem will be teeming with smart contracted jobs and services that developers, data scientists, and vendors will be performing for SaaS business clients that are looking for real-time predictive analysis and contextually relevant recommendations to acquire, retain, and monetize users in their app ecosystem.

The Cere ecosystem provides a SaaS-DeFi smart contracting platform that will allow network participants to easily mobilize financial assets and put them to work in Decentralized Finance (DeFi) instruments. Instead of having this capital sidelined in the SaaS space due to inefficiency in payment and settlement mechanisms, enterprises will open up new revenue streams and provide much-needed capital inflow to the DeFi space.

Lots of enterprises work with data marketplaces, this phenomenon is gaining consequent adoption and delivers value for enterprises that are integrated into its proprietary ecosystem.

Cere enhances this principle but uses an open and decentralized version of such a data marketplace. Data in the innovative marketplace of Cere is not locked into a single entity but drives communal value by being fully open and interoperable, supported by smart contracts designed to work with both Cere and Polkadot/Substrate chains.

This enables developers from all over the world to work with any dataset they want at any time.

The ODM set-up of Cere holds similarities with the service platform of Fiverr, only the Cere ODM serves complex data-driven assignments.

Cere’s ODM can be used for the following purposes:

• Being able to unlock the next level opportunity in efficiency through data security, agility, and interoperability to directly access business datasets, which are typically locked in by layers of SaaS agreements and are inaccessible for the majority of developers and data scientists communities.
• Enterprises are in the position to use specific DDC tools to granularly decrypt, enrich, filter, and further anonymize their data. In this way, the data is prepared for processing for data experts, who can validate the data via staking Cere Tokens and associated workflows.
• Smart contracts that power the marketplace work directly with the DDC to capture the granular steps of the workflow in terms of access and execution, using chain-link oracles for mapping to verify external processing.
• Every single piece of consumer data is anonymized and multi-key encrypted with user and business keys during the onboarding into DDC. The Cere marketplaces provide additional security and privacy measures, such as federated data learning and differential privacy in order to facilitate secure remote collaborations.

Cere Network is currently working with 2 separate testnets, Testnet 1 is used for live integrations, while Testnet 2 is used for continuous development testing.

Cere uses a level-2 private network that is used by enterprises to connect to the Testnet of Cere. Please refer to this link for the Open Grant Program Master Application Cere.

Cere offers 3 ongoing enterprise integrations, of which one already live and running. This first integration is set on a travel center chain with over 300 locations throughout the US. Subsequently, a full US rollout is planned X 2021, which will reach over 100K users.

Thanks to these successful implementations, two follow up integrations are already in progress with Fortune 1000 enterprises, in where the first integration alone already reaches 1M up to 50M users

In 2020, Cere completed the following:

• The first set of grants with Web3 Foundation
• Expanding the team globally with offices in; US, Germany, The Netherlands, Belarus, China, Vietnam, and India.
• The realization of the initial alpha data platform and testnet.
• The settlement of the advisory board, including members from Salesforce, Lime, and TMF-group.
• Successfully deployed enterprise integrations for initial customers on top of the testnet and data platform.
• Building partnerships with top projects like; Binance Labs, Republic, Ankr, Chainlink, Matic, Darwinia, Tidal, Ren.
• Engaged channels community channels on; Telegram(60K+), Twitter(75k+), and Linkedin(8K),

Keep an eye on our announcement channel to stay up to date.

Enterprise adoption and decentralized blockchain networks have been viewed as two opposing ideals, compounded by the scaling, decentralization, and security trilemma. Cere resolves this paradox by way of a holistic and system-wide solution for scalability, interoperability, and seamless integration of the global app ecosystem into a decentralized economy powered by blockchain technology.

Cere and its stakeholders are convinced that the pathway to mass adoption is through enterprise adoption. This will be realized by working with successful enterprises that already have millions of loyal users. The Cere team developed an easy and straightforward SaaS solution to drive further adoption through traditional sales and marketing practices.

For the next 12 months,we are focused on the following:

• Complete fundraise and initial listing (private/public/LPD)
• Further expanded the team with top quality innovators and developers
• Alpha Mainnet Launch in Q2 2021 to support upcoming enterprise integrations
• Work with other top Polkadot projects and W3f team to thoroughly test/prep mainnet and prep for Parachain ops.
• Complete 3+ additional Integrations with top brands to build success case studies to accelerate content marketing and more inbound growth
• Launch of our NFT platform in Q3 2021
• Reaching $1M+ revenue and 2M monthly active users
• Launch Cere Open Data Marketplace in Q4 2021 with real data and jobs to onboard 1000+ developers

Cere’s SaaS-integration partners, both internal and external, deliver custom solutions for enterprise clients that leverage the Cere Network blockchain infrastructure. In order to drive economic value for the Cere utility token, +- 20% of all Cere SaaS fees will be used for network transactions, and another 20% will be allocated to the Cere Open Data Marketplace to stimulate activity between enterprises and data engineers.

Traditional CRM's are outdated, expensive, hard to integrate with today's AI and data-driven solutions. New data cloud solutions like Snowflake are disrupting these traditional CRM's by offering much more flexibility and faster integrations, e.g. bringing near real-time computing onto highly dynamic and customizable datasets.

The competitive advantages of Cere over Snowflake can be found in next question.

Cere’s Decentralized Data Cloud facilitates plug-and-play customer onboarding that leverages identity abstraction technology, achieving the much sought-after GDPR & CCPA compliance for enterprises by design.

Similar to Snowflake, we are building tools to extract and virtualize enterprise data with near real-time event-sourcing into customized datasets for Machine Learning (ML), analytics, or partner integrations.

The key differences between Cere and Snowflake are:

• Cere’s asymmetrical data encryption allows any computing process such as an AI agent or partner integration script to be dynamically provided with signatures to access certain customer datasets. This means data can be securely shared into decentralized use cases such as the Cere Open Data Marketplace (similar to Snowflake's data marketplace, but not locked to just 1 vendor).
• Cere’s entire system is designed from the ground up to focus specifically on individual user data encryption, privacy-compliance, and hyper-personalization, which is what traditional data lakes, data warehouses, and CRM's (including Snowflake) are not designed to do.

Cere DDC captures and stores individually encrypted customer interaction data, along with value transactions to each user’s individual ledger and individual tamper-proof and time-capsuled data structures in IPFS clusters. This allows enterprises to capture customer journeys in individual ledgers for more personalized data intelligence operations. This enables enterprises to share customer data on the Open Data Marketplaces, without exposing sensitive data.

With Cere’s privacy tool, the Decentralized Data Viewer (DDV), enterprise apps can permit their users to look up all data collected in their tools. In this way, Cere turns the traditional blockchain privacy issues into a win/win for both enterprises and customers.

With Cere, customer data is guaranteed to be compliant with GDPR and CCPA privacy regulations, giving it a major competitive advantage over other CRM solutions offered in the market.

Data custodianship on Cere is governed by the following four principles:

• Data Governance: The process of managing the availability, usability, integrity, and security of the data in enterprise systems, based on internal data standards and policies that also control data usage. Effective data governance protocols on Cere ensure that data is consistent, trustworthy, and doesn’t get misused or compromised.
• Data Ownership: Customer data stored on Cere chains are fully encrypted through secure RSA encryption and partitioned per enterprise entity with a state-of-the-art identity management system. Application data is associated with anonymous, randomized IDs, non-identifiable personal information. Only users and entities with the associated private key can decrypt and deanonymize their own data.
• Secure Collaboration:Cere will natively implement multi-party computing techniques such as federated learning and differential privacy to allow decentralized collaboration without exposing privacy-regulated customer data to the party analyzing (part of) the data.
• Data Compliance: Enterprises operating in regions with strict data privacy regulations such as GDPR and CCPA can leverage Cere’s hybrid architecture to create a permissioned environment with blockchain-based authorization and audit capabilities defined by state transition functions, while still maintaining interoperability with the rest of the network.

We are welcoming you to join our community. You can contribute to the community in many ways! The best place to start is here.

Looking for more or anything to share? Get in touch with our marketing team via [email protected]

We are currently running the second version of testnet with our third batch of testers. Over 500 people have applied as tester, if you want to join. Make sure to keep an eye on our social channels. We plan to do a full release after the listings.

Thank you for your interest! Please contact us at [email protected]