There are 7 proprietary innovations that deliver Partisia Blockchain’s complete Layer 1+2 Blockchain. In this blog we present the fourth innovative feature — the zero-knowledge layer — we call it Athena.
For an overview of all of the 7 features see the Zeus blog. We present each of the 7 innovations with a unique post leading up to TGE on May 31, 2022.
“The lack of confidentiality and privacy on blockchains is obvious and hampers their uptake and use”. This is the first line of the white paper and the starting point of the Partisia Blockchain as the project is all about bringing privacy to blockchain.
Current mainstream blockchain technology provides full transparency about transactions and a pseudonymized representation of the users. Adding privacy in terms of “private transactions” to this mainstream blockchain model is challenging as one cannot both have private transactions and be anonymous. Another often overlooked problem is the privacy problem around the data used prior to a transaction as opposed to the transaction itself. As an example, it may require the use of private data across hundreds of potential buyers and sellers to get to a single transaction. Providing privacy to this part is what has the potential to turn the current business model in the internet economy upside down and put the user back in control of their own data.
The Partisia Blockchain is designed to bring privacy to blockchain in a regulatory compliant and flexible way. The basic design choice is to build privacy on top of a transparent mainstream blockchain model. This allows us to design a highly efficient and scalable consensus and execution laid out in the Poseidon and Iris blog. Privacy-preserving computation is added as a service on top of the basic blockchain. From an application developer’s or designer’s point of view, this allows for any arbitrary mix of transparency and privacy. The privacy-preserving computation makes it even possible to add privacy to the extent needed — and you can even have complete privacy. As an example of this, consider a dApp with its own private transactions built on the Partisia Blockchain, this way any audit request can be done with privacy-preserving computation and the transactions can remain private in a regulatory compliant way.
The privacy-preserving computation is provided and operated exclusively by accredited ZK nodes in known jurisdictions. This further enables dApps to be regulatory compliant with data protection regulation like GDPR for two main reasons:
Hereby, Partisia Blockchain enable basic GDPR requirements like the “Right to privacy” (Data is kept private in all stages: at rest, in transit and process) and “Right to be forgotten” (Data is used ad hoc and the encrypted data used in zero-knowledge computations are deleted after use).
For more details, please checkout the yellow paper and software documentation.
Please let us know what you think and stay tuned for the next blog post about MPC-As-A-Service, called Demeter.
Thank you to everyone in our community for your support!
Partisia Blockchain Team
There are 7 proprietary innovations that deliver Partisia Blockchain’s complete Layer 1+2 Blockchain. In this blog we present the third innovative feature — the token bridge — we call it, Hermes.
For an overview of all of the 7 features see the Zeus blog. We present each of the 7 innovations with a unique post leading up to TGE on May 31, 2022.
The evolution and innovation around blockchain technologies has resulted in a variety of different blockchain networks with different strengths and weaknesses. This development will likely continue and interoperability and token bridges as the most prominent instrument, has become a major value creator in the blockchain ecosystem. Designing secure token bridges is, however, a significant challenge as values are moved out of the security model backing the involved tokens.
Partisia Blockchain has designed a new type of token bridge that addresses existing weaknesses. This is an important innovation as any use of Partisia Blockchain involves external coins, hence, token bridges are part of the very backbone of the blockchain network. We believe this is a superior foundation for a more solid token bridge.
The Partisia Blockchain token bridge model utilizes a number of cryptographic tools and basic economic principles. The core basic principle is a collateralized token transfer represented 1 to 1 across two independent blockchain networks, which basically mimics a double booking system that has proven its worth since the Medici Bank in the 14th century. The challenge is to simultaneously represent and work with states from two independent blockchains as efficiently and as securely as possible. The token bridge is illustrated and briefly described below.
The illustration captures the three main components of the token bridge around the two basic operations — depositing and withdrawing values.
The first part is the double bookkeeping principle within regularly expiring epochs: The process ensures that the information is persisted on both blockchains and establishes a straightforward auditability that is easily accessible by all users and node operators. Deposit and withdrawal is managed by a small set of independently selected Oracle nodes — the small Oracle — in expiring epochs as further described below.
The second part is the collateralized bridging within the regularly expiring epochs: The small Oracle consists of Oracle nodes with sufficiently available MPC tokens that function as locked collateral during an epoch. The epoch expires when the small Oracle runs out of MPC tokens as collateral. In the following epoch any holder of MPC tokens can stake to run a dispute in case of fraud.
The third part is a secure selection of small Oracles: An MPC based signature scheme operated by the large Oracle (i.e. all available baker nodes) ensures that the selection of the next small Oracle matches the security of the consensus model. The large Oracle is also responsible for delegating the job of mirroring the identity of the members of both the small and the large Oracle to the partner chain. With that in place, the double bookkeeping is securely established.
For more details, please checkout the yellow paper and software documentation.
Please let us know what you think and stay tuned for the next blog post about the zero-knowledge layer, called Athena.
Thank you to everyone in our community for your support!
Partisia Blockchain Team
There are 7 proprietary innovations that deliver Partisia Blockchain’s complete Layer 1+2 Blockchain. In this blog we present the second innovative feature — the sharding model — we call it Iris.
For an overview of all of the 7 features see the Zeus blog. We present each of the 7 innovations with a unique post leading up to TGE on May 31, 2022.
The so-called blockchain trilemma is all about the difficulties in designing a blockchain that can scale to handle any number of transactions without hampering secure decentralization. The key to unlocking this challenge is sharding, which is the art of parallelizing consensus without compromising security:
Partisia Blockchain solves the blockchain trilemma through sharding involving all baker nodes across all shards as a genuine layer 1. This way, sharding does not impact the Poseidon provable consensus model and hence neither diminish decentralization nor the overall threshold security model.
An illustration of the scalable block creation where each shard creates verifiable blocks according to the consensus model presented in the Poseidon blog is provided below. The consolidated blockchain shows how the sharding scales linearly in the number of shards i.e. a blockchain running with three shards can handle three times as many concurrent transactions as a blockchain running without sharding. To see this, note that the consensus process, including the time consuming propagation of messages, is done in parallel and independently across shards. A governance shard keeps track of the shards and distributes the block creation work across the independent shards. Also, the security model ensures that all new nodes are properly represented across all shards and thereby validate every transaction.
This way, the capacity of the Partisia Blockchain can be scaled up to meet any number of transactions per second (TPS). The capacity of a shard is roughly 1,000 TPS and a new shard is just one transaction away. Even in the rare case of a time consuming full BFT reset on one shard, the workload allocated to other shards and the impact on the capacity of the entire blockchain will be marginal only.
Sharding is an integrated part of the initial version of the Partisia Blockchain and will gradually be developed to dynamically adjust for throughput by spinning up new shards on demand exactly as cloud computing allows dynamic load balancing.
For more details, please checkout the yellow paper and software documentation.
Please let us know what you think and stay tuned for the next blog post about our collateralized token bridging, called Hermes.
Thank you to everyone in our community for your support!
Partisia Blockchain Team