Jun 11, 2020
Elrond Gets Access to Privacy-preserving Smart Contracts via ARPA
Elrond and ARPA have entered into a partnership that will achieve interoperability between the two blockchains, giving applications which use the Elrond blockchain in their technology stack access to secure multi-party computations on ARPA.
ARPA is a privacy-preserving computation network which allows multiple entities to jointly contribute different sets of data for mixed computations, without actually revealing one party’s data to the others. A trivial example is the Yao Millionaire’s problem where Alice and Bob can find out who’s richer without revealing how much money each of them has.
“Achieving privacy for Elrond transactions is an important milestone in our project’s roadmap, so we are excited to see ARPA’s work on privacy-preserving multiparty computations, and the opportunities created by this partnership for the Elrond ecosystem.” said Beniamin Mincu, Elrond CEO.
The secure multi-Party computation which ARPA implements in a decentralized and trustless network enables applications using Elrond’s highly scalable blockchain to have privacy features which are critical for e-health implementations, data renting, information marketplaces and fintech scenarios, just to name a few.
In effect, ARPA will be latching onto the Elrond Layer 1 high-throughput blockchain as a Layer 2 privacy-preserving computation layer. Thanks to their own scalability & efficiency features, ARPA computations will not fall out of sync with our blockchain.
“Only second to privacy, our goal is to build a protocol which provides value extremely fast, in tune with the limited amounts of time businesses can afford to wait if they want to stay competitive in the high-speed digital business environment. We are very happy about how the partnership with Elrond enables us to achieve that goal.” said ARPA cofounder & CEO Felix Xu.
ARPA is being built by top researchers. Ph.Ds and engineers in the field, with backing from silicon valley ventures like Arrington XRP Capital — Michael Arrington himself is sitting on the board of advisors — and notable partnerships with Sinochem and JD.com. The project is currently in pre-alpha mainnet phase and integration work with Elrond will accelerate immediately after the two partners launch their respective imminent mainnets.
About ARPA
ARPA is a blockchain-based solution for privacy-preserving computation, enabled by Multi-Party Computation (“MPC”). Founded in April 2018, the goal of ARPA is to separate data utility from ownership, and enable data renting. ARPA’s MPC protocol creates ways for multiple entities to collaboratively analyze data and extract data synergies, while keeping each party’s data input private and secure. ARPA allows secret sharing of private data, and the correctness of computation is verifiable using information-theoretic Message Authentication Code (MAC).
About Elrond
Elrond is a new blockchain architecture, designed from scratch to bring a 1000-fold cumulative improvement in throughput and execution speed. To achieve this, Elrond introduces two key innovations: a novel Adaptive State Sharding mechanism, and a Secure Proof of Stake (PoS) algorithm, enabling linear scalability with a fast, efficient, and secure consensus mechanism. Thus, Elrond can process upwards of 10,000 transactions per second (TPS), with 5-second latency, and negligible cost, attempting to become the backbone of a permissionless, borderless, globally accessible internet economy.
