Partisia's layer 1 blockchain protocol focuses on privacy protection

0:01i'm ashton addison for block west capital an investment pitch media and Crypto Coin Show today on blockchain interviews we have najeeb awini the marketing and tech advisor for particia blockchain najib welcome to the show and it is great to have partisa back on again i'm excited for this discussion thanks for the invite ashton i'm pleased to be there today

0:22likewise i would love to kick off our talk with just first of all hearing a little bit about your background in the blockchain space and how that led to you working with partisan blockchain yeah so i'm coming from the cyber security space with 20 years of experience around this space i used to work in a large digital identity program when i was working in a

0:44previous life let's say in france with large corporations like dallas and working in digital id system working with digital id system give you an overview of personal data privacy and security and going with large programs like the department of defense in u.s french passport you know i was leading the french biometric passport and the identity program for morocco

1:12government you make aware that privacy is really a concern when you when you want to centralize a large database of identity so then i specialized around this space and smoothly go to the blockchain because i would like to go for decentralized way to store identity so this is my jump to the centralized world to the centralized world very cool in the jeep great background

1:38and there's definitely a lot of privacy aspects that still need to be integrated into the blockchain space you know there's a lot of initiatives but i don't think there's any foolproof solution right now and i know partisa is working on some other security and privacy aspects with their layer one protocol i would love if you could elaborate just

1:58for the audience that hasn't heard of partisan blockchain just what is pratisha blockchain an overview of some of the main solutions they're trying to drive into the market yes so if you look the blockchain ecosystem today you will find a lot of blockchain layer one here two solutions that focus on two two very important thing that smart contract

2:19capabilities and scalability but the privacy aspect is let's say not really focus for this kind of blockchain even for ethereum blockchain this is not addressed today well with a large platform and particia would like to solve that let's say remaining topic and the team around particia is really specialized on what we call multi-party computations so it's a

2:43breakthrough mathematical techniques that allow for example two-party to compute on data without disclosing their data and this in the and their the computations if you take an example between you and me ashton we can say we have together a salary and we don't want to dis disclose the value of salary so what we will do with the all the people around the table we will just

3:06make a computations without disclosing the salary but we can compute the average of the salary of peoples around the tables so these techniques will really help to do private computation on data that we don't want to disclose so barclays platform is really want to address this point this aspect of privacy with blockchains because we know that blockchain is public ledgers that's

3:30really why blockchain exists today to have transparency to have a settlement of transactions that can be verified by multiple nodes but we can do that with what we called private computations and really partisan blockchain would like to address that to focus on use cases like the digital identity system i mentioned before let's say i want to be able to verify my

3:56identity to a party without disclosing too much detail i want to control what detail i give to the party the party just to need to know what they need to know for example they just need to know that i'm an adult they need to know that i'm leaving switzerland they need to know that i have more than 18 years old and that said they don't need to collect all the

4:18private data and make like we know excessive collection of personal data that could lead to massive data breaches so partisia blockchain has two aspects the scalability also like other blockchain try to address but one unique aspect partisan is focusing is privacy and we focus on social impact project myself i'm involved in many humanitarian

4:45projects we are soon announce a very major solution we do for ngos because we would like to focus on social impact and social goods if you look for example identity system today they are all centralized system and partisan will address that issue with a decentralized identification of users of refugees of people to keep their personal data private with

5:14this mpc techniques definitely yeah great info najib and with the secure mpc multi-party computation i've heard of that as a privacy functionality in blockchains before but i'm curious you know how easy is that to implement into the blockchain and then into the ecosystem where you know there's a lot of people using ethereum or there's

5:40other blockchains and the privacy function is only i'm guessing it's going to start by focusing on partisa it has mpc but really the rest of the industry would need to catch up to implement these kind of privacy techniques yes yes that's really the challenge in fact to make this interoperability between the public ledgers and what we call private ledgers parties in fact

6:05address that with two layers one will be public layers with a big smart contract public transaction that will be visible to all all people around the planet so this is a classical ledgers that is needed in a way to give the transparency but we need a second layer the second layer will run private smart contract and private transactions why we need these two layers we need to be

6:29complete we need to complement the let's say the missing po the missing part of other blockchains but we need to be compatible with other blockchain but give give them the way to write transactions that can be hidden to other parties and when i say item we don't want to disclose for example when you do an auction you don't want to disclose the price of the

6:50auction we want to disclose the winner of the auctions so that's why we need this private player and we need this private smart contract executions so this tool here will help to get the bridge to get let's say the other blockchains and we have a unique capability that is called bring your own cone bjork so if you look the way partisan works you can take your

7:12ethereum cone you can take your cardano whatever coin you have to the public ledgers and make private transaction on the second layer that's the unique capabilities in fact do not other blockchain addresses they have their own token for their own system ecosystem that make difficult to make interoperability between blockchains and if you look at the

7:34landscape of blockchains today and i've been in this space in several years like the last five years when i was started to work on bitcoin now i think you get lost with all these blockchains every day every month we have a new blockchain with a new token utility token new smart contract language new new capabilities but they all in fact realize that the same

7:59things and they do not address the really essential point when you work in blockchains is transparency scalability but as i said before privacy and if you bring privacy to the blockchain then you have a winning solution you have something that make blockchain secured make blockchain transparent and make blockchain confidential because you need confidentiality if you work in the

8:26enterprise not only you need confidentiality when you work for example on digital identity system healthcare system and also auction we talk about nft nft you do auction you don't want to disclose the amount of money you are spent to buy an ft nft collectible because at some point you want to keep this data private to you private to the winning

8:52transactions so partisan would like to address that this is why the blockchain is not let's say today in mainland because we have to focus really to address these challenges and to make it really secret and we have right now an ongoing security audit to be sure that we have not missed an essential piece of the of the puzzle definitely thanks for that background

9:15najib and that sounds really interesting about the layer two that you were talking about and from what i got there is it true that you can essentially like wrap ethereum or other coins into the layer two and that makes it a private asset and then you can trade or do defy and lake lending staking things like that with assets that aren't on partesia is that

9:42possible yeah that's the concept called bring your own cone bjork no this is the essential piece of partisan blockchains i cannot tell more on that topic because today i didn't experience myself these functionalities but it's coming around soon so i prefer to not discuss too much technical detail it's better better to wait the first smart contract

10:06that showcase that capabilities that developers are focusing today what i can disclose today is we are developing for example an applications that is you know you know in switzerland we have done this elf pass you know like all the countries that develop healthcare past covet pass so switzerland has developed one which is fully open source fully open source

10:30fully this fully let's say capable of not giving too much personal detail and we have added on top of this swiss covet passport the capabilities to make proof what you call zero knowledge proof that you get the vaccine without disclosing your personal detail without disclosing the name of the vaccine we just need to know are you vaccine or not and this

10:55proof has been written on partisan blockchain and executed via smart contracts so soon this application will be published in open source as we did for the swiss covet passport and showcase the full capabilities of what we call zero knowledge proof and this case is really essential if you look developing countries in africa they don't have a modern pki infrastructure

11:21like we have in europe to verify signature digital signature it's too complex because you have to have a centralized system again with a central signing system and this is where parties already give this value to such country to such use case we don't need centralized authority to verify your proof what you need is a computation node that could be

11:47installed everywhere in the world and this computation node will be able to verify that proof for you and the coin that we use for that can be any coin to make the opera to operate this node or this is where this bring your own coin capabilities will in fact facilitate the interoperability of the ecosystem and we would like to address that with bringing

12:14developers the tools and the development kits that help them to adopt particular blockchain smart contract but also to make their application they have developed in ethereum make zero knowledge proof to the second layer of participle with this private smart contract capabilities keeping their original application running in ethereum but have the bridge

12:37to the partisan blockchain because we don't want to also read down the will we want them to be able to run their knowledge proof capabilities and we provide that what we call mpc as a service layer and this is the idea to give the other blockchain these capabilities that today they miss because the lack of let's say privacy techniques and to be clear that the teams around

13:02partisan is massive you know if you look the team around is a research more than let's say a thousand people research around that so it's not like invented in two years it's not a it's really massive research around that we have well-known professors working on it and the team is amazing they really understand the essential piece of the of the techniques which is making

13:26private competition private secret sharing and also private transaction najib i think that's going to be very promising for ethereum and having that as a service where you can plug it in to you know the existing ecosystems so i'm looking forward to seeing how that plays out and you mentioned that the team has been working on the protocol for quite a while it's in the test net phase

13:53can you talk about moving forward you know when are you anticipating a main net launch and you know what are the next big milestones coming up leading towards that yes today the team is really focused on this security audit which is really as i said before it's an essential part of the project we don't want to launch something that has not been reviewed but

14:12peer-reviewed by expert we have worked with one of the top security audit films on that also peer review with experts we work also myself i'm based in lausanne epfl i work with a known professor doing that for us also we have also expert around the space helping us to review the code to review smart contract we designed already first smart contract on

14:36test net and we asked the community to test this smart contract as i said we prototype first elf pass passport which we give free of charge because it's open source as an example of applications so the main net if i cannot discuss too much will be launched this year q4 maybe q1 but q4 is the focus with we've let's say a few applications to pilot the magnet to strive

15:04adoption of the magnet we also develop in parallel real applications i can disclose two applications one which is my let's say my personal choice is an eid system which will be used by swiss canton to be used as ready eid system concrete eid system and if you know the news around switzerland switzerland is really close to adopt and sent a decentralized eid system

15:31because swiss switzerland is also decentralized we have swiss content in themselves they can run operator node they can then sell validate transactions so swiss is really a small country but we already we are already decentralized so it could be a very interesting pilot for the community to see what we do in switzerland and then the idea is to scale for other

15:52other let's say example nft could be something interesting to explore you mentioned defy there is i think a limited use case and we will let the community to define the use case artesia foundations has developed a grant program to help developers to develop adopt and make real concrete applications around partisan blockchains so let's see what the community is doing around partisan

16:18maybe we will have very interesting use case and applications around this mpc as a service which is today unique in the in the blockchain space i completely agree and i'm looking forward to seeing those applications roll out and towards the mainnet launch for the viewers that are looking to follow along najib with for towards the mainnet launch and all of these updates that are coming

16:42out what's the best way for them to learn more about partisa so in fact if you want there is a very interesting articles on the medium page of partisan it starts with several parts if you start i recommend ready to start from the part one which explains the overall description of partisan so this is for introduction for people to get into this mpc zero knowledge

17:04proof mathematical things and if you look the medium article from ivan damgard and peter and kurt it's amazing evangelist they have really explained in the simple word what is mpc multi-party computations so i really recommend the medium article then they can go for people who are more let's say technical expert they can directly go to the particia blockchain.com website they

17:30will find developers a git git book the github also they will look the documentation around running a node setting a node on the test net they will get a lot of mpc token to evaluate the test net i recommend to try themselves to make some first smack contract there is already one published smart contract which is already running sort of really introduction medium

17:56article for non-technical people and for technical people they can go to the developer page on participation.com sounds great najib i will leave all those links in the description box below all the best to you and your team moving forward with the partisa launch and let's follow up in the near future thank you for your interview