Fast Fairy Series: Fairblock’s Vision
Fairblock Delivers the Practical Privacy Tools Enabling Novel Web3 Applications
Blockchains are built on cryptography, and yet they’re almost universally lacking one of the most useful capabilities that cryptography can provide: privacy. Across the web, privacy is essential in a variety of commonplace applications, and that need extends to decentralized apps, where nearly all activities are currently visible to anyone.
Fairblock is built for delivering programmable privacy throughout the blockchain space in a modular way. Developers can leverage Fairblock’s encryption tools to create more compelling decentralized applications, and users are afforded much-needed protection from malicious actors who are currently taking advantage of publicly-visible financial transaction flows. Thanks to Fairblock’s modular design, any blockchains and the applications built on them can make use of this robust privacy toolkit.
Privacy Tools Widen the dApp Design Space
The decentralized application space is in need of privacy technologies to deliver better user experiences and implement a wider variety of apps.
A leading cause of the slow progress when it comes to developing a wider variety of decentralized apps is that all on-chain activities are publicly visible on nearly all blockchains, with very limited exceptions. This diminishes the utility of existing applications like exchanges, where order flow is exposed. Without privacy even such simple use cases as hiding information from opponents in games are infeasible. While some tools have emerged that allow developers to incorporate privacy into applications, they’ve either been centralized solutions, forcing developers to sacrifice decentralization in order to add utility, or standalone blockchains that force developers and users to migrate to a new environment and new apps.
Without a decentralized programmable privacy solution, the design space for truly permissionless apps is limiting. Builders need robust, simple-to-use encryption tools in order to escape these narrow confines and create applications that most people will actually want to use.
Encryption Protects DeFi Users from Malicious Actors
DeFi has achieved success in attracting users and capital, but with all transactions publicly visible, it isn’t offering optimal user experiences.
Today, when users of decentralized exchanges submit trades, they show all the world the range of prices they’re willing to pay to swap one asset for another or the size of their limit orders, giving opportunistic actors the opening to abuse that information and make a profit at the user’s expense. On top of that, traders are unable to protect their alpha — their trading strategies are visible to anyone for copying or undermining.
This need not be the case. Transaction privacy gives DeFi users powerful safeguards against a variety of tactics that manipulative actors are currently using against them.
Fairblock’s Enables Privacy Across All Blockchain Ecosystems
Fairblock serves as a hub that exports privacy-as-a-service across the increasingly interconnected blockchain space. Through a modular architecture, it enables privacy on any blockchains that harness Fairblock’s state-of-the-art cryptographic tools. Additionally, rather than going all-in on a single cryptographic tool such as zero-knowledge encryption (ZK), Fairblock empowers blockchains and apps with several forms of encryption, each suited to enabling a distinct set of user experiences.
Fairblock delivers the means to bolster ecosystems like Ethereum and Cosmos, so their blockchains can finally have privacy everywhere it’s needed. This means existing users get a seamless upgrade to better applications, while application developers are able to work in a greatly expanded design space.
Fairblock’s Capabilities
Privacy is enabled differently in different contexts. Sending a private message, for instance, relies on a different kind of encryption than what protects the contents of your hard drive. Fairblock is making several advanced cryptographic schemes including threshold identity-based encryption, threshold fully homomorphic encryption, and witness encryption available. Each of these has unique capabilities that blockchains and applications built on them can leverage.
Using identity-based encryption (IBE), Fairblock allows for encrypting the contents of transactions before they’re posted on-chain all the way up until their execution. Decryption of those transactions can also be customized by associating the encryption with particular conditions, such as when a voting period ends or when certain market conditions occur.
Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) will allow for even greater flexibility for designing privacy-preserving applications. By allowing for computation on encrypted data, this cryptography scheme enables use-cases such as on-chain voting where only the aggregate tally in a vote is revealed, while individual votes remain private. In DeFi, it allows for trades to remain private even when they’re executed, which protects traders’ strategies from being leaked. Truly private rollups are also made possible with privacy-preserving computations. Unlike current zk rollups, by using FHE transaction data no longer needs to be shared publicly with rollup provers or even on-chain.
With witness encryption, Fairblock will become an even more secure and decentralized system by allowing for encryption and decryption that doesn’t rely on the trust assumptions associated with using the validator set of its proof-of-stake blockchain for encryption and decryption. You can see more on Fairblock’s architecture here,and we’ll cover these trust assumptions in greater technical depth in our next post.
This just begins to provide a surface overview of how these cryptographic schemes work and how they can be used. We’ll be diving deeper into each of them as well as exploring application use-cases in future posts. Beyond that, we’re excited for creative application developers to apply them and combine them in ways we haven’t even imagined.
A Pragmatic Approach to Privacy
In our in-person lives we can often take privacy for granted. We expect that our bank balances and paycheck deposits aren’t broadcast for anyone to observe. We send emails to specific people intending for those messages to be read only by the recipients. Fairblock is providing the means for users of decentralized applications to enjoy this freedom of choosing when and where to share things publicly when they’re online. Using Fairblock, app developers throughout the blockchain space can design a wide range of applications that require privacy to give users optimal experiences.
Blockchains enable apps that give users greater control over the things that pertain to them. Fairblock is here to ensure that these apps are also able to offer the normal privacy and security that users deserve.
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About Fairblock
Fairblock delivers programmable privacy to decentralized applications, saving users from malicious actors and unlocking a new design space for developers. It provides builders in any blockchain ecosystem with an array of cryptographic tools that are purpose-built for a variety of use-cases. With Fairblock, blockchain transactions are protected against manipulative strategies, and new kinds of applications and utilities are unlocked, such as private intents, private governance, sealed-bid auctions, randomness generation, and censorship-resistant rollup sequencing.
