The “unparalleled” nature of Partisia Blockchain’s “provenance and depth of experience” makes it uniquely positioned to solve the problem of data privacy in public blockchains, Adrienne Youngman, CEO of Partisia Blockchain Foundation, told CoinDesk in an interview on Tuesday.
Privacy has been a weakness for public blockchains making companies and institutions reluctant to use the technology to solve real problems for years because it reveals sensitive data. Earlier this year, crypto analytics platform Arkham’s CEO Miguel Morel said: “Publicly available blockchains are probably the worst possible way to keep someone’s private information private.”
Partisia says it “full data privacy” as the “industry’s most secure, interoperable token and data bridge that uses advanced multi-party computation (MPC) to bring privacy to public blockchains, helping anyone implement complex use cases that impact the average person. But what made Partisia uniquely positioned to offer this solution when similar service providers such as Fireblocks, Zama.ai and Chainlink are visible competitors.
Youngman and Partisia’s Chief Product Officer Mark Bundgaard said the depth of experience, a result of its 36-year-old origins, makes it unique. In 1988, Danish cryptographer Ivan Damgård co-wrote the first article multiparty computation (MPC) during his PhD studies at Aarhus University.
He is also credited with co-inventing the Merkle-Damgård construction, which is used in influential cryptographic hash functions. By the time the 2008 financial crisis broke out, Damgård was a university professor who had founded Partisia, a Denmark-based technology group. Partisia applied MPC to solutions for the Danish and Norwegian governments and multinational corporations, before combining it with blockchain for private implementations.
“Partisia was founded to address a critical challenge in the ‘real world’: enabling collaboration on sensitive data without compromising privacy,” said Youngman. “Our blockchain is based on decades of cryptographic expertise from pioneers like Ivan Damgård, allowing us to build solutions that not only overcome barriers to real-world adoption, but also create entirely new business models, giving individuals and companies unprecedented control over their data .”
Youngman said Partisia blockchain has a proven track record of more than 16 years, including with the Danish health authorities will use patient data without revealing their identities. It has also worked with world leaders like Bosch and humanitarian institutions like the Red Cross, with whom they work to make aid distribution in conflict areas more efficient and safer.
MPC is a cryptographic technique that secures secrets by sharing them with multiple parties so that no one party has complete control over the wallet, increasing security. It differs from Zero Knowledge Proofs because it offers more composability or more combinations, and allows more complex queries to be executed. ZKPs validate knowledge without making it public.
The MPC token is also the native token of the Partisia blockchain.
Read more: MPC explained: the bold new vision for securing cryptocurrency