August was filled with exciting developments and reflections for Partisia Blockchain. In this recap, we share our upcoming participation as a Gold Sponsor at Token2049 in Singapore, where we will lead discussions on DeFi and Real World Assets (RWA) and the value they bring to the future of our industry. We also highlight the launch of our first mobile wallet, Koala Wallet, which now supports our MPC token across multiple platforms. Additionally, we are now members of the ERC3643 Association, positioning ourselves at the forefront of the RWA tokenization standard setting. We also reflect on key insights from our team members, including Peter Frandsen’s thoughts on data privacy and Bruce Ahn’s perspective on growing the Web3 pie. Dive into the full update to learn more.
We are excited to announce that the Partisia Blockchain Foundation is a Gold Sponsor at Token2049 in Singapore, held at the iconic Marina Bay Sands. Join our team alongside our exceptional partners as we showcase our leadership in DeFi and RWA with thought-provoking speeches, trendsetting panels and interactive booths. On 18–19 September 2024, do not miss our exclusive reDeFining RWA event, where we will explore the future of RWA, DeFi, and multiparty Computation (MPC). No Token2049 ticket is needed to join our event on level 3 in Marina Bay Sands. You can register for Day 1 (18 September) and Day 2 (19 September) here. Stay tuned on our socials to check out the partners we will be bringing along with us. See you there!
Our first mobile wallet, Koala Wallet, developed by Eucalyptus Labs, now supports our MPC token across iOS, Android and browser extensions. The next step is to integrate this wallet into various applications, with browser integration and upcoming DeFi applications set to roll out next month. For detailed instructions on how to add MPC tokens, be sure to check out this link.
Partisia Blockchain Foundation is now a contributing member of the ERC3643 Association. As part of this group, we will actively shape the future of this standard. We believe RWA is key to expanding the Web3 ecosystem, and our role in the Association cements our credibility as a key player in this space. During our AMA with Luc Falempin, Director at the ERC3643 Association, the team touched upon the various critical components of RWA, going beyond simple tokenization and the role Partisia Blockchain will play in helping to push the standard forward. You can watch the AMA here.
Last month of the summer saw an increase in publicity with Partisia Blockchain being mentioned in a number of media outlets. A few highlights include a Crypto News op-ed about bringing transparency into the fundraising process and measuring a direct impact of charities. The piece further highlights our joint efforts with the likes of the Elton John AIDS Foundation and Health Innovation Exchange to trace the impact of donations through the Partisia Blockchain-powered Vorne platform. Partisia Blockchain also made it to CoinMarketCap’s list of Top Staking Rankings. CryptoNews and NewsBTC highlighted our integration with Koala Wallet. Shirly, Mathias and Bruce Bruce were on various X Spaces to engage with the wider audience on a variety of topics, including products, AirDrops, DEX progression, our launch of the mobile wallet and other topics. Listen to both AMAs here and here.
In early August, our Chief of Growth, Shirly Valge, had an insightful engagement at BlockStart in Glasgow on 1–2 August. She took the stage to engage in panels discussing the challenges of managing global Web3 regulations and the transformative potential of tokenization in democratizing access to real-world assets. It was an inspiring event filled with valuable discussions on the future of Web3 and blockchain innovation.
In August, our Co-Founder, Peter Frandsen, shared his thoughts on a pressing issue: how to share confidential data between organizations while maintaining privacy. In his blog, Peter explores how MPC technology is transforming data collaboration, ensuring security without compromising privacy. Dive into his insights on the future of data-driven decision-making here.
Mathias Glintborg, our Head of Product, explores how Partisia Blockchain is enhancing Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) by integrating secure multiparty computation (MPC) and blockchain technology. He discusses how MPC addresses key challenges, such as private data activation, secure storage and privacy in SSI, offering a more complete solution than current models. This innovative approach not only improves data privacy and verification, but also opens up opportunities for compliant data analytics and private AI. SSI builders can leverage this cutting-edge technology, with support and grants available from Partisia Blockchain to help launch the next generation of digital identity solutions. Bruce Ahn also reflected on his recent meetings and conferences. In his opinion piece, Bruce discusses the urgent need to expand the Web3 ecosystem by introducing real-world use cases and engaging new users. His reflections offer his insights into how the boundaries of blockchain technology can be pushed. Explore Bruce’s thoughts here.
We are excited to announce that in September 2024, we will distribute our next set of staking rewards—the largest to date! Over 3 million $MPC tokens will be distributed. Make sure to stake your tokens now to participate in this upcoming reward period and maximize your returns.
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In previous articles we have discussed how secure multiparty computation (MPC) and public blockchains can enhance digital identity for verification and self-sovereign identity (SSI) in particular.
It is now time to take a deeper look into how Partisia Blockchain and its MPC capabilities enhances SSI to cope with the unsolved challenges around private data activation.
This is a great opportunity for SSI builders to pick up cutting edge privacy technology and leverage our support to launch the next billion dollar digital identity business.
For the best teams, we offer grants and dedicated support directly from our core team. Apply for grants here.
Now, let’s get into it!
SSI revolves around issuers such as KYC providers that issue verifiable credentials (VCs) to users who store the identity data on their own hardware – therefore “self-sovereign” – typically in an identity software wallet on the phone. Verifiers are the third-party who can receive various types of identity data presentations from credentials such as proof of country and birthdate from a KYC credential. Presentations of VCs is the equivalent of showing physical credentials such as a passport, but in a digital and secure manner.
Presentations are generated in identity wallets by the users themselves and the exchange of them are facilitated by a secure connection that is often managed by a centralized service called an agency.
The idea about SSI becomes really powerful when users receive and hold multiple VCs from multiple issuers that make up entire digital identities, which is entirely owned and managed by the user at first. The complete identity data simply will not rest anywhere else besides on the users own hardware, until the users chose to present the data which in addition can be protected with privacy features such as selective disclosure and zero-knowledge proofs e.g. you only show jurisdiction and prove that you are more than 18 years on from a complete KYC credential that contains much more information than what’s needed for the verifier.
Notably, VCs are inherently more secure than traditional credentials, such as physical driver’s license, because digital signatures make them tamper-resistant and instantaneously verifiable. Moreover, VCs are digital, portable and reusable, which cuts cost and makes everything much more convenient for users.
However, as much as SSI offers users true ownership of identity data, it also poses challenges in regards to privacy and compliance when activating the data through presentations for verifiers, backup and storage.
In its current form, SSI does not have strong enough privacy when activating the data through presentations because once a VC has been presented to a verifier, regardless of using privacy features such as selective disclosure and zero-knowledge proofs, the data rest with the verifier in a black box that users cannot control. How data is handled from there would rely on trusting the verifiers to comply with regulations such as GDPR, potential auditing from authorities, and any specific agreements with the users. Furthermore, there is a lack of frameworks and standards for compliant, provable and transparent data monetization which is needed to encourage mass adoption.
Another major issue with SSI in its current form is that users are only left with two options for backup of identity data that either compromise security or privacy. One option is to backup and store identity data on another piece of self owned hardware resulting in multiple self-sovereign controlled backups. However, in reality, this is not convenient for users and if hardware is lost, so is the data.
The second option, which is by far the most convenient and popular, is to store identity data externally with a third party, such as a cloud service. This way, users will unlikely lose the data itself and can always access it. However, relying on centralized external services can result in compromising privacy and giving up control because there’s little transparency in how data is stored and manipulated.
Another profound problem with SSI in its current state is the reliance on intermediaries, often known as agencies or agents, to establish connections between parties and facilitate the exchange of VCs.
Partisia Blockchain has as the world’s first L1 operationalized MPC for general computation on a public blockchain, which means that one or multiple data sources can allow others to compute on the data while it stays encrypted and operate under predefined rules expressed in smart contracts. This is also known as confidential compute and several privacy enhancing technologies (PETs) share this capability. However, MPC is superior when computing on multiple inputs and quantum resistance is a hard requirement.
Confidential compute opens up an ocean of new use cases such as private voting, RWA ownership verification, supply chain provenance, GDPR compliant data analytics across multiple data silos, and very importantly for this article enhanced and complete privacy in SSI.
Partisia Blockchain and its MPC capabilities allows a user with an identity wallet to encrypt identity data with secret sharing encryption and then share it with a network of MPC nodes that will not be able to read the original data because the secret shards are distributed amongst the network. There is simply no way to reconstruct the secret and read the original data unless individual secret shards are collected based on a threshold, which is protected by MPC and a collateralized non-collusion security model. Furthermore, secret sharing encryption is by default quantum resistant, so it is not possible to brute force a secret with a supercomputer unlike other PETs like fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) that relies on public key encryption.
This also means that MPC allows for users to have data stored in a “self-sovereign” external network which can function as back-up or simply storage, but more importantly, a private SSI platform to activate the data against a verifier’s request through private verifications and standard privacy features. Partisia Blockchain natively supports multiple standards and can produce presentations for private verification, but also across private and public blockchain for various purposes.
Private verification is really what sets MPC enhanced SSI apart from the current SSI e.g. during the recent pandemic, many attempts were made to create a Covid-19 passport so citizens could prove they were either vaccinated or tested negative while preserving privacy in the claim. Zero-knowledge proofs are good for this, but limited to only presenting yes/no results to a verifier without extensive physical verification, such as ID cards, which would compromise SSI principles.
In collaboration with HES-SO Valais-Wallis, Partisia Blockchain developed a solution where identification is reduced to matching an individual’s face with an image of the person’s face powered by MPC in order to increase security and privacy. The Partisia Blockchain ensures trustworthy information is broadcasted to the verifier and MPC ensures that the private information about the citizen is used only for matching and kept hidden for the verifier.
While MPC is powerful for verification, the idea about having identity data in a private secure network is also useful for use cases that revolves around private AI, e.g. identity data can remain encrypted while a private AI model compute on it and only when the user received the output it can be decrypted incl. the result from the AI model.
Very significant for the above solutions is that the agency is left out so the secure connections and data presentations are managed directly from the MPC clusters where the data privacy is protected and data managed completely on the users’ terms.
As aforementioned, MPC is powerful when it comes to computing on multiple inputs while preserving privacy. This unlocks a massive potential for compliant and private data analytics on multiple users data combined for use cases such as healthcare data for pharmaceutical R&D and data aggregations for monetization where users are rewarded, but didn’t give up privacy.
The concept is the same as for a single user data where secret sharing encryption is performed and the secret shards are distributed to MPC clusters. However, for multiple users the MPC nodes are able to combine and compute on the data while never understanding the complete input and share encrypted outputs which can only be decrypted and understood by selected users as predefined in zk smart contracts.
DID/SSI is a large stack of different technologies and this article has only covered how to enhance SSI which is the lacking component to offer compliant end-to-end solutions on top of the existing stack. Together with our partners, we are also building out a significant amount of the fundamental DID/SSI component such as agency, mobile SDKs, identity wallets, standards, DID method, DID resolvers, onchain DID documents, definitions and schemas, trusted registries and more.
Reach out to us for a conversation and learn more about our technologies.
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As a part of my role at Partisia Blockchain Foundation, I meet a large number of interesting people at various conferences and events. Some are in Web3 in nature and others are more institution based. And I find there is a difference between these two types of people that highlight what I think is one of the biggest challenges in Web3 currently.
In Web3 conferences, I’m usually meeting the same people I met year after year.
My recent trip to Malaysia and Germany showed this phenomenon clearly. During the Malaysia Blockchain Week, I met with Web3 people who were all in the industry for many years working on similar projects as they were last year. On the other hand, outside of the blockchain conference, I also met with leaders in the health tech industry whom we had deep conversations about how to solve real world problems using Partisia Blockchain’s MPC technology. At the IAS event in Germany, with over 25k in attendance, we were the only blockchain company presenting a Web3 solution.
Kurt Nielsen, our president, put it best in this interview where he speaks about the importance of “growing the pie” in Web3. Meaning that in order for Web3 to succeed, we must find new users, new real world use cases, and new ways to solve real problems using this wonderful technology called the blockchain. Yet, everyone I meet in Web3 conferences is always telling me, “I’ve been in this space for the last x number of years.” It is extremely rare to meet someone who says “I’m new to the blockchain space and interested in learning how this can solve our real world problem”.
Fighting for a share of the same pie
The current Web3 conferences, for the most part, have people who are fighting for the “share of the same pie” it has been fighting for multiple years, so to speak. It’s the entity that has the same players, building the same type of applications for the same group of people year after year. And while you have a few real world industries looking to experiment with blockchain, most, if not all of the Web3 focused events I go to are full of people building the same thing, but packaged just slightly differently. Why is this the case?
And so we see two different themes emerging. Those who are the early adopters, the visionaries and pioneers building Web3 and integrating blockchain technology into real world use cases to solve real problems, and those who are looking for the quick token launch and get rich plan disguised with the pretense of revolutionizing an industry. One has a long and promising future. The other… Well, you can only go so far when everyone is fighting for the same pie..
“Privacy, interoperability, and scalability are fundamental principles that have been pillars of past successful technology innovations and they will be for the Web3 industry as well.”
Partisia Blockchain’s focus has always been about collaboration and solving real world problems. We have founders who understand the challenges of the real world. In the real world, privacy is a fundamental human right, and your private information should not be disclosable to everyone. In the real world, people collaborate and work together to grow the market you are in rather than close off your ecosystem to only those who can pay with your own currency. In the real world, infrastructures are scalable, available to support the world’s population. (Think the internet for example) These fundamental principles play out in real world scenarios and while blockchain provides an incredible value proposition, one of decentralization and trustlessness, it is not a complete solution. Privacy, interoperability, and scalability are fundamental principles that have been pillars of past successful technology innovations and they will be for the Web3 industry as well..
This has been our focus, and the reason why our blockchain architecture is built different. And, as a result, we have quite a number of real world partners working to build things that impact the real world. And we continue to garner interest from people who are looking to solve real problems.
We are committed to growing the pie by bringing the technology to non Web3 industries. Use cases like the humanitarian token system, where we are able to distribute financial aid to those impacted in conflict regions. A donation platform where using blockchain technology, aid can be distributed not only quickly, but also transparently giving the donors full visibility to whom and how their donations made an impact. Tackling counterfeit medication in Africa through a combination of transparent and private supply chain infrastructure. These are samples of real world problems Partisia Blockchain is tackling to solve.
In the Web3 space, we are also focused on adding these fundamental principles that are currently missing to help grow the pie within. Providing DeFi solutions that solve for interoperability, scalability and privacy. Partnering with academia to create a framework for DID that governments can support. Building solutions that enable a real trustless, secure, and interoperable self custody solution that can be built to suit the users individual requirement.
The Web3 industry will undoubtedly continue to survive. Thrive even. But it will also evolve from the current hype cycle to something more mature. As this maturity continues, the need to meet these basic fundamental principles will become more apparent. We also need to work together to grow the pie, rather than fighting for a share in the existing pie. And those who understand and share in this vision will help drive the next generation of Web3 solutions. We hope, through this maturity, we will grow the pie, and perhaps see a new friendly face join the next Web3 conference.
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