This is Web3: Detailed end-to-end encrypted collaboration tool Skiff

Jiawei

2022-04-27 12:12

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How to lower the threshold for user groups engaged in highly sensitive work is an issue that Skiff needs to consider.

Original title: "This is Web3: End-to-end encryption collaboration tool Skiff"

Original author: Jiawei (Twitter: @Elegy4TheArctic）

At the end of March, a Weibo blogger who was starting a business posted that the team used The browsing records of two Tencent employees appeared in the private Tencent documents of Yu Collaboration. In this regard, Tencent officials have not yet responded. But under the normalization trend of remote collaboration, this is enough to trigger our thinking about the privacy of collaboration tools.

What is Skiff?

Skiff was born for this and has won the favor of top VCs.

Skiff was established in March 2020. The team currently consists of 15 employees. The two co-founders are Stanford 2019 graduates, majoring in computer science and electrical engineering, and has worked at SpaceX and Apple.

On March 31 this year, Skiff announced the completion of a $10.5 million Series A round of financing led by Sequoia Capital. Previously, Sequoia also led Skiff’s $4.2 million seed round of financing. Angel investors in this round included former Mozilla CEO John Lilly and former Coinbase Chief Technology Officer Balaji Srinivasan.

Similar to the collaboration tool Notion, Skiff is the main privacy feature, and the core selling point is end-to-end encryption and decentralized storage.

According to Wikipedia's definition, end-to-end encryption (E2EE) is a kind of information that only users participating in the communication can read communication system. It can prevent potential eavesdroppers: including telecommunications providers, Internet service providers, and the provider of the communication system from obtaining the plaintext of the communication between the two parties. Both WhatsApp and Telegram, which are instant messaging software, provide support for end-to-end encryption.

In general, unless the owner of the document chooses to share it with others, no one can access the data, not even Skiff as the product provider to the user documentation. Currently, Skiff has open-sourced its Associated Data Authenticated Encryption (AEAD) library and UI component library, and released a technical white paper.

Skiff provides iOS, Android and Mac versions, supports free use, and provides personal/team professional editions, and the annual monthly price is 8 / $12.

Skiff also supports Web2/3 registration methods, that is, registration via email or Metamask. Using the latter to log in to Skiff requires providing a public key, and then you can download the PDF version of the Recovery Key to recover the account.

Currently, more than 20,000 people use the collaboration tools provided by Skiff.

Some questions

Although we Know the importance of privacy, but in most cases, privacy as the core of the product is not just needed: some people ignore the importance of privacy protection; some people choose the latter between privacy and laziness despite their awareness—maybe We don't care that much about privacy. This seems like an unsolvable problem.

"Switching cost" is a concept of microeconomics, which refers to the increased cost when customers switch from buying products from one supplier to buying products from another supplier . Switching costs at the product level refer to the barriers for people to switch from one product to another.

It is not always easy to break the rules. Example: My team and I are used to collaboration tools like Notion, Slack, and Google Docs, and have accumulated a lot of material and data. I know your product is good, but I don't want to spend time and effort to learn the details of how to use it. what to do?

Skiff has done some work to keep switching costs as low as possible, such as supporting one-click migration of files from Google Drive. Skiff also offers an additional incentive: a $15 Skiff Credit when migrating, and these credits can be deducted when subscribing to the Pro version.

Conclusion

For encryption-native project teams, Skiff will be very good Collaboration tools.

The flip side of privacy is censorship resistance. From the perspective of Crypto, as a Web3 application layer tool, the user group of Skiff may also include some teams engaged in high-sensitivity work, such as journalists and scientific researchers. How to lower the threshold for such user groups is also an issue that Skiff needs to consider.

As a relatively mature collaborative application, Skiff does not have much room for innovation in terms of innovation, and end-to-end encryption is not a high-threshold technology. After all, apart from "privacy" and encryption integration, Skiff does not reflect much difference from Notion. In other words, what if Notion also offered encryption options?

Since it is based on native encryption, Skiff can consider designing some Crypto-related collaboration templates, such as project investment research tracking, transaction records, etc., to improve user experience; Spend some effort on product migration. All in all, hope to see wider adoption of Skiff in the future.