From the Pedersen Commitment to Concordium
Interview with Concordium’s CTO, Torben Pedersen
You have quite an impressive background in IT. What drew you to the world of blockchain technology? Is there a story behind it?
Blockchain technology is a very interesting area utilizing many of the innovations in cryptology from the last 30 years. However, what really attracted me to start working at Concordium is the vision to create a high-quality blockchain that meets regulatory requirements and is based on scientifically proven protocols and methods. Blockchain computing will continue to modify the tech landscape and user experience in the next couple of decades. Having the privilege to participate in designing a solution using cutting-edge tech to help businesses to meet the challenge is a chance that happens once in 20 years.
You are the father of the Pedersen Commitment, could you explain what is this commitment, seen as a Bible for most of the crypto community?
I started working on the commitment scheme when constructing a secret sharing scheme allowing anyone receiving a share of a secret to verify his share alone — ie., without talking to anyone. The commitment scheme is a basis of this and has the nice property that one commits to relatively much data in one go in such a way that no one ever — even if we one day get a quantum computer — can get any information about this data unless the owner decides to reveal it. With this property in place, it is often much easier to prove the security of cryptographic protocols using the commitment scheme. Another reason why it has been so popular is probably that it is very simple, and it has the following property which is useful in many situations: If I have made commitments C1 and C2 to two numbers, A1 and A2, then the product of the two commitments, C1*C2, is the commitment to A1+A2.
Why Concordium?
First of all, because Concordium has a unique tech approach, rooted in world-class research, that will create a leading permissionless and public blockchain for businesses. But mainly because we don’t compromise on user-privacy while enabling audit-ability. This is our main mantra. Providing a compliant-by-default platform where the user stays sovereign. But why Concordium? Because Concordium is not trying to “teach” the Industry how to use the power of Blockchain but Concordium is coming from the Business world to help businesses use blockchain technology to enhance day-to-day productivity. And why Concordium? Simply because of this great team coming from all over the world with an amazing record in Businesses, Tech and Science. I could go on but I guess that’s enough?
How would you describe the Concordium Architecture?
Concordium is innovative in its approach to the fundamental challenges of all public blockchains from network security to smart contracts. But the two central innovations are the tight integration with regulatory requirements and the new 2-layer consensus protocol. As I said before, our blockchain enables provably private transactions, while providing means to de-anonymise actors with suspicious behaviour. The latter being done under strict regulatory control. Our new consensus protocol combines the traditional longest-chain-rule with a Byzantine Agreement Protocol. The former allows very fast addition of new blocks and the latter ensures that new blocks are quickly protected against roll-back. This combination allows for obtaining a measure of the network conditions and based on this measure the blockchain can be dynamically optimised for security and performance. We will exploit the strong consensus mechanism to provide “Finality as a Service” supporting cross-chain interoperability and enabling sharding.
Which feature(s) of Concordium separate it from the rest of the market?
Several features separate Concordium from the current market. First of all, our identity layer that can be used for any verified credentials, and our two-layer consensus approach that preserves speed and security through the finality layer. But we have thought and designed an easy-to-use onboarding mechanism for Businesses together with a smart staking model and a distribution approach that will make the difference in the end of the road. In other words? A complete approach.
Speaking of Identity, Concordium has a novel approach when it comes to Identity, preserving both user privacy and compliance, how did you build this design?
The Concordium network does not hold any personal information on its users. All persons’ privacy is well protected from the eyes of the public and held by an entity. Through the use of zero-knowledge proofs, we can associate credentials with accounts completely hiding the relation between all accounts held by the owner. However, through two or more registered entities on the Concordium network, authorities can hold malicious users accountable. Thus our use of zero-knowledge proofs enhances privacy for both retail and enterprise users.
Will Concordium be smart contract-compliant and what is your general approach to this feature?
Concordium has a holistic approach when it comes to Smart Contracts. Our Blockchain will be smart contract-compliant. This is built-in in our protocol. These days we are exploring several solutions to both launch our own smart contract language but also to enable other smart-contract languages to be supported on Concordium.
Everybody speaks about interoperability and sharding, how will Concordium implement these features, and which benefits do you expect?
The novel design of finalized blocks enables anyone to validate the blocks in the Concordium blockchain by verifying the signatures on finalized blocks. This is our cross-chain approach. When it comes to sharding, we will enable shards, initially focusing on private ones, that will use our Finality Service. This is a pragmatic approach. The benefits are simple: we will enable private shards for applications requesting this and provide better scalability with no comprise on security. A win-win scenario.
Choosing a PoS mechanism is challenging, how is Concordium dealing with block creation and finalization?
A lot has been said on the subject. And we do follow with a lot of care what our friends and competitors are doing in the subject. The staking landscape is just at the beginning of its long life and will see a lot of enhancement to really meet with the current and future needs. We try to have a careful approach and deploy a staking mechanism based on a Pure Proof of Stake. While we have already tested Delegation/Nomination mechanisms, these will be released at the right time and only if it will make sense to both our users and our partners.
Is Concordium Open Source? And what do you plan for future developers to do with Concordium?
Concordium aims to release its code in an open environment before Mainnet. Developers will not only enjoy open access to the code but will enjoy a smart developer-friendly Hub where they’ll be able to find the right documentation, SDKs, and APIs to build apps and dapps upon the Concordium Blockchain.
What’s the current stage the tech team is? And what are the next plans for 2020?
We are not far from releasing our second Testnet that will include the integration of Identity Providers, some great visualization tools as well as the beta launch of our ConcordiumID App on Android to create and manage Identity objects. On our website, we maintain a roadmap to keep everyone updated on our plans.
When is the launch?
Soon and most likely at the beginning of next year. Stay tuned!
Join Concordium in our different channels:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ConcordiumNet
Discord: https://discord.gg/xWmQ5tp
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/33433672/
Telegram: https://t.me/concordium_official
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Concordium_Official
Developers Hub: https://development.concordium.com/tech
Learn more: https://concordium.com
