How Does the World’s First Sino-Korean Joint IEO Project Build Global Community?
In the era of Big Data, privacy computing proves to be an important solution in the realization of blockchain-scale calculation. ARPA, which specializes in providing privacy computing, has great potential for development. ARPA is committed to using secure information flow solutions to provide privacy computing power and data to businesses and individuals. It is based on a cutting-edge, secure multi-party computing cryptography algorithm. Within the ARPA network, its use as a protocol layer can provide privacy computing power for any public chain, giving developers secure analysis and utilization, and eliminating the prospects of accidentally exposing private data to any third party.
On May 8, 2019, ARPA co-founder and CGO Yemu Xu joined an interview centered around the question: “How Does the World’s First Sino-Korean Joint IEO Project Build Global Community?”
*The following is the original script of this interview, which has been translated from Chinese into English*
1. What is ARPA?
In short, ARPA is a protocol layer (Layer2) privacy computing network, which can empower public and alliance chains to realize the function of privacy computing within the blockchain. Specifically, we are dedicated to protecting the privacy of data on the blockchain.
Blockchain privacy and scalability are the two biggest problems faced by public chains at present. The promise of scalability has given birth to a lot of excellent CoinMarketCap (CMC) top 50 projects, but privacy so far has not enjoyed the same exposure.
Our medium-term goal for ARPA is gain a place within the CoinMarketCap (CMC) top 50. Our long-term goal is to be a benchmark against the Amazon Cloud Computing Service, which has a market capitalization of $400bn, but with greater decentralization, and a safer and higher level of data privacy. If you take note of nothing else today, remember, when it comes to privacy, think of ARPA.
In essence, ARPA aims to decentralize data and eventually liberate personal data from giant organizations. We are based on multi-party security computing (MPC) and a “smart contract 2.0,” or in other words, an “intelligent data contract.” This is also the infrastructure of distributed business in the future.
One can think of us as service providers. We monitor the privacy calculation requests of blockchain users through a Proxy Smart Contract, and complete privacy calculation under our blockchain computing network. The data of the users within the whole computing process is encrypted text, and cannot be decrypted ever. In this system, one does not even need to leave the local database.
At present, the test network of ARPA on Ethereum has been released, and we have also worked with top public chain IOST, and popular IEO projects such as DUO Network and Blockcloud, to provide MPC-based privacy computing power.
On the community side, we conducted the world’s first joint China-South Korea IEO two weeks ago, and we ignited the dynamic connection between two of the hottest blockchain communities in the industry. Our IEO was done on BISS.com, the world’s first crypto-to-crypto and crypto-to-stock exchange invested in by Metropolis VC, the largest investor of IOST, ThunderCore, Lambda and 0x. Our IEO was also conducted on TokenMan, South Korea’s largest crypto community. Today, it has more than 480,000 active users on Naver alone, covering a large proportion of South Korea. An IEO in our opinion is a great way to shape brand recognition, attract supporters and build up communities. We are achieving exactly that, by becoming the world’s first China-Korea IEO project, we are bringing these two populations together in a way that hasn’t been seen in the blockchain world yet.
ARPA is equivalent to the role of the “fuel provider” in this industrial chain. The privacy computing power of (MPC) cryptography, based on secure multi-party computing, can ensure the public chain plays an important role in data security exchange. Exciting to-B and to-C applications can be implemented on ARPA secure computing network, such as enterprise-level credit checking, accurate marketing, medical diagnosis, consumer-level personal data security wallets, distributed key management, and so on.
Speaking of distributed key management, I have to mention the breaking news today, news that everyone in this community is very concerned about. The world’s largest exchange — Binance — has been hacked. 7000BTC gone in a second. According to a preliminary investigation by some of the major security agencies, exposure of user API keys and secret key information likely resulted in the attack. Centralized key management is exactly how this hack was enabled.
From Mt.Gox to Bitfinex, to today’s currency security, one of the biggest problems with centralized exchanges is that the private key is not in the hands of the users, but under the control of the exchange. Andreas Antonopoulos, the preacher of Bitcoin, has always had a mantra of “Your keys, your Bitcoins; not your keys, not your Bitcoins”. So strictly speaking, the Bitcoins you have on the exchange do not belong to you. Centralized exchanges now store and manage private keys in a centralized way. And when people open their wallet, the private key is in visible, which opens up a golden opportunity for attackers.
The ARPA team had a conversation with CZ, the CEO of Binance and the Binance team not too long ago, where we discussed the possibility of using secure multi-party computing to manage (KMS) private keys. Everyone agrees that using multi-party secure computing to do KMS is one of the safest and most effective ways to ensure that keys are kept private.
All this is very similar to when society used to use paper money, and the streets were full of thieves. Now that Alipay and WeChat Pay are popular, have you found that there are fewer thieves on the street? The answer is no.
2. What problem does ARPA solve, and how does ARPA add value?
Data is a new asset class. It is like the oil and gold of the internet era. Think about it — before the Internet era, the value of real industry was mainly realized in the form of production materials, such as machines, real estate and so on.
Today’s Internet giants have a market capitalization of tens of trillions of dollars in data generated by individuals like you and me. However, a large amount of data simply cannot be effectively used, because privacy cannot be guaranteed.
When operating with sensitive information such as finance, identity, credit, medical care and other sensitive areas, both the data owner and the user bear a great deal of risk. Many scenarios cannot be realized through our existing technology. Things like data security computing, sensitive information querying, joint data analysis and modeling, and others, are simply unattainable. ARPA, however, can allow the data that exists in isolated islands to flow, safely, all over the world.
3. So what is the impact of this technology on individuals? As ordinary people, how do I sense the changes brought about by ARPA?
From a personal point of view, if you rent my data, you expect to get more accurate advertising promotion, enjoy better financial products, and get real material returns for me. While security is ensured, you can get real compensation, so everyone will be willing to contribute to their data, resulting in greater network effect of the data, and, ultimately, truly liberate all of the potential of that data.
The ARPA privacy computing network can truly separate the right to use data from the right of use. The technical barrier is very high; ARPA provides the underlying technology for these scenarios, removes data intermediaries, helps enterprises to give full play to the value of data, and will promote security management, exchange and realization of personal data for a long time.
4. Why is ARPA a world-class project?
Let’s take a look at those who are not among the top 50 CMC projects that nevertheless have a huge community base and a strong consensus around the world. For example, Ethernet, EOS, TRON, IOST, ONT and so on. Hardcore technology is one of our core competencies, and internationalization is in the genes of each of our members.
ARPA’s core team, research team, technical advisors, and business advisors have global backgrounds. Most of the research and consultants are from different countries, speak different languages and they bring different expertise. Our team speaks six languages: English, French, Japanese, Korean, German and Italian. We work closely with the world’s leading cryptography professors, together with a team of visiting Harvard scholars, Carnegie Mellon software engineers, University of Michigan computer experts, Tsinghua University cryptology PhDs, senior engineers, architects, and consulting specialists from international enterprises who are responsible for the implementation of our technologies from the likes of Google, Amazon, Huawei, Blackstone and Fidelity Investments.
Additionally, our business partners, and commercialized applications are all domestic and foreign conglomerates and institutions. We will continue to expand our partners around the world. Our team is focused on building a global community. We laid our foundation as the first joint IEO project between China and South Korea. This is a solid first step in internationalization. We now have telegram groups set up spontaneously by community members in several languages: English, Thai, Korean, Russian, Indonesian, and Vietnamese.
Before we make our public IEO appearance, we have already begun our globalization journey since the inception of our project. We have held meetups in eight regions of the world since last May — Beijing, San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Macau, St. Petersburg, Bangkok, and Ho Chi Minh City. On average, there were more than 150 people per meetup, and each meetup received positive feedback. In our Chicago meetup, Walmart’s former chief marketing officer (CMO), Julie Lyle, came to show support in person, which gave us a lot of confidence. Our biggest advantage is to have the world’s leading technology, and to expand and internationalize the global market with strong user growth methodology.
5. What are the next steps for ARPA?
Starting next week, we will launch the second step of our globalization effort, codenamed Project Apollo. Apollo is a one-month, global airdrop program: ARPA community members can receive points awards through their own contributions to the ARPA community. These points can be accumulated and later converted into real ARPA tokens and be traded on the exchange. Contributions include: daily tasks, inviting friends, social platform interactions, and so on. We will soon announce the details of the event. I sincerely invite you to join us as our first core community users. More details to come soon.
Next, we will connect with communities around the world and hold a series of meetups.
Our blockchain expert, Dr. Yifei Wu — with a Bachelor’s degree from Peking University and a Ph.D. from Tokyo University — was invited by the internationally-acclaimed Waseda University in Japan to discuss blockchain technology in Tokyo on May 11. On May 20, ARPA will attend the largest Blockchain Summit in South America La Conexion in Colombia, as a guest speaker. At the same time, we have been in contact with a number of top exchanges.
Stay in the loop with ARPA by following us on Telegram, Twitter and Medium.
Website: www.arpachain.io
Telegram: https://t.me/arpa_community
中文电报群： https://t.me/arpachinese
Medium: https://medium.com/@arpa
Twitter: https://twitter.com/arpaofficial
To get more information about ARPA, or email at about@arpachain.io
