Apollo — Unified Public and Private Smart Contracts

Apollo — Unified Public and Private Smart Contracts

There are 7 proprietary innovations that deliver Partisia Blockchain’s complete Layer 1+2 Blockchain. In this blog we present the sixth innovative feature — public and private smart contracts — we call it Apollo.

For an overview of all of the 7 features see the Zeus blog here. We are presenting each of the 7 innovations with a unique post to explain each feature.

Apollo — Unified Public and Private Smart Contracts

Smart contracts are programs stored and executed on the blockchain. The automated execution of smart contracts based on predefined conditions is a significant part of the value proposition from the blockchain ecosystem in general. Today this kind of tailored services are managed by third parties in control of the users’ data — a situation that created the current internet economy or web 2.0 with large information giants.

The privacy-preserving computations built into the Partisia Blockchain add an essential dimension to smart contracts. With general privacy-preserving computation, smart contract automation enables a data driven economy with private digital agents that remain in full control of the private data involved. This is a new way forward for the internet economy with the users in control of their own data and hence their own bargaining power.

To realize this vision, the smart contracts on Partisia Blockchain are designed for general coordination of public and private computations — a unified public and private smart contract language. A very significant innovation is the private smart contracts that makes it simple for any developer to tap into zero-knowledge computation or MPC-as-a-Service. As MPC is a very advanced technology — it is an explicit goal that the expertise and knowhow of the Partisia expert team will be gradually built into the smart contract language. This will ensure the uptake of an otherwise complex technology and enable efficient execution and avoid security breaches.

We believe that general privacy-preserving computation and our private smart contract language will move the blockchain ecosystem to a new level and open up for an entire new field of use cases.

The smart contracts will enable users to take advantage of the full stack that has been designed to bring privacy to all platforms. The scalability provided by Poseidon and Iris enable efficient zero-knowledge computation and the Bring Your Own Coin (BYOC) provided by Hermes ensures economic alignment with the networks that integrate with Partisia Blockchain.

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 market for trust, called Mithra.

Thank you to everyone in our community for your support!

Partisia Blockchain Team

Demeter — MPC-as-a-Service

Demeter — MPC-as-a-Service

There are 7 proprietary innovations that deliver Partisia Blockchain’s complete Layer 1+2 Blockchain. In this blog we present the fifth innovative feature — MPC-as-a-Service — we call it Demeter.

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.

Demeter — MPC-as-a-Service

The single most important contribution of the Partisia Blockchain project is to bring general privacy-preserving computation to blockchain and most notably Secure Multiparty Computation (MPC). MPC is a revolutionary technology that allows us to protect our data, not only when they are being stored or communicated, but also while they are being processed.

Using Secure Multiparty Computation, individuals and organizations can allow their private data to be used for a certain purpose, while retaining complete control over the data. One example is a new type of “data exchange” where the data owners remain in control of their data and where only the result of privacy-preserving computation is shared or exchanged. This allows citizens to participate in continuous assessment of healthcare treatment or for competing companies to share best practice for the greater good. Another example is financial markets, where private order books can be matched continuously and only matching trades executed. These are just two examples of services already developed and tested in real life — we believe that the Partisia Blockchain dApps ecosystem will reveal the true power of MPC-as-a-Service as a core part of WEB 3.0.

To be secure and efficient, MPC requires participation of multiple parties that share the computational work to be done. This avoids having to trust any single party, but also leads to practical challenges related to coordination of the computing parties and managing the communication with the data owners.

This is why the entire Partisia Blockchain is designed for secure and efficient orchestration of MPC-as-a-Service. The team behind the project has pioneered MPC and delivered commercial grade MPC since 2008. Partisia Blockchain is probably the most ambitious MPC platform and it comes with an extensive set of tools and a new set of MPC protocols called REAL. A core feature is efficient preprocessing that utilizes all the blockchain orchestration of many nodes to the fullest extent to speed up realtime use of MPC. We call this Demeter MPC-as-a-Service and claim that we set a new standard for how to conduct any type of privacy-preserving computations within and beyond the blockchain ecosystem.

For more details, please checkout the yellow paper, software documentation and the Medium blogs.

Please let us know what you think and stay tuned for the next blog post about the unified public and private smart contracts, called Apollo.

Thank you to everyone in our community for your support!

Partisia Blockchain Team

Athena — Zero-Knowledge Layer

Athena — Zero-Knowledge Layer

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.

Athena — Zero-Knowledge Layer

“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:

  • First, Personal Identifiable Information (PII) never enters the transparent blockchain; it is managed exclusively by the ZK nodes and in encrypted form.
  • Second, with jurisdiction management on the ZK nodes, the PII data stays within a given jurisdiction and remains encrypted.

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