In brief
- Singapore-based Human Protocol specializes in using humans to do mundane tasks via tools such as hCaptcha.
- The company announced it was launching a new service on the Solana blockchain.
Human Protocol helps machines learn. It does this by soliciting people to perform so-called labeling tasks—identifying raw data, such as videos, images, and text. That, in turn, provides meaningful information and context for machine learning to improve tasks such as speech and visual recognition. Yeah, machines eat this stuff for breakfast.
Today, the Singapore-based foundation announced that it’s integrating with Solana, a high-throughput blockchain designed to provide fast, secure, and scalable decentralized apps and marketplaces. Scalability is crucial to equipping developers/organizations with additional resources to execute task labeling, and Human Protocol believes the Solana blockchain’s capacity is perfect for the job.
San Francisco-based Solana Labs was co-founded in 2017 by former engineers from Qualcomm, Dropbox, Intel Alan Yu, Anatoly Yakovenko, Eric Williams, Greg Fitzgerald, and Raj Gokal, Stephen Akridge. Scalability and transactions per second (TPS) have long been a hot topic in the blockchain industry. Bitcoin can handle roughly 5 - 7 TPS and Ethereum 20 - 30 TPS (ETH 1.0) and approximately 100,000 TPS (ETH 2.0), Ripple 1500 TPS, Bitcoin Cash 60 TPS, and Litecoin 56 TPS. In comparison, Solana claims its blockchain can handle up to 710,000 transactions per second on a 1GB network without partitioning.
What is Human Protocol
Human Protocol was founded in 2017 by Eli-Shaoul Khedouri and Alex Newman to power distributed marketplaces and reward users for contributing and helping machines get jobs done. This help comes by way of providing reasoning and knowledge to Human Protocol’s applications.
"By launching Human Protocol on Solana, we are allowing devs to launch decentralized work pools on the Solana blockchain using technologies like CVAT, the free, open-source annotation tool, created by Intel," Lonnie Rae, Human Protocol’s head of operations told Decrypt.
To date, Human Protocol's most recognized use case is hCaptcha, a verification web application that aims to disrupt Google's reCAPTCHA with a privacy-focused alternative. hCatpcha integrated with Cloudflare in April 2020 and replaced Google's reCAPTCHA, which had been used by the Internet services provider. It is currently the second-most-used CAPTCHA, after Google's reCAPTCHA, with over 1179 websites using it, according to data provided by builtwith.com.
The Solana future
Today’s announcement shows the faith Human Protocol is putting in the Solana blockchain. Other projects using Solana include Civic, Star Atlas, The Media Network, Bonfida, and Arweave.
Solana co-founder and COO Raj Gokal is bullish on the relationship between Human Protocol and Solana telling Decrypt: “Human Protocol is creating a global brain formed through billions of interactions in a decentralized marketplace. This is the rare combination of vision, execution, and ambition Solana was built for.”
The Human Protocol launch on Solana is scheduled for late 2021.