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Blockchain technology has evolved significantly over the last decade, gradually disrupting traditional business models. While the technology is transforming business processes by obliterating intermediaries to reduce costs and increase operational efficiency, the string of attacks on popular protocols and exchanges raises critical questions about the security loopholes of this evolving technology.
Industry veterans and blockchain communities are questioning the security of blockchain-based technologies. More specifically, the question echoing through social media platforms and community forums concern the future of the technology and everything it has to offer. The inherent decentralized and transparent nature of blockchain isn’t well-equipped to simultaneously offer privacy and trust to ensure private and tamper-free data.
For instance, even with the current range of privacy-enhancing technologies, blockchain transactions can be monitored and seen throughout network nodes, especially those on public chains. These network nodes produce tons of metadata that can be tampered with to reveal personal information from encrypted data, primarily through pattern recognition.
Add to this the fragmented blockchain ecosystem where each individual chain relies on third-party solutions for interoperability and cross-chain transactions. These bridges that connect individual chains have become a lucrative target for malicious actors, who have constantly exploited the loopholes to siphon off millions of dollars from the DeFi, NFT, and other blockchain-based ecosystems.
With the Web3, DeFi 2.0, and Metaverse movements gaining significant momentum in recent years, paired with the introduction of a myriad of cross-chain interoperability and scaling solutions, the necessity of end-to-end data privacy and trust has become the need of the hour. Luckily, several promising blockchain projects are building novel privacy-focused solutions that will solve the security and trust issues to a considerable extent and even potentially obliterate them entirely. That said, here are three privacy-focused projects that aim to ensure unparalleled data security across the blockchain ecosystem.
Weaving Multi-Party Computation Into Blockchain-Based Services
The first project that we want to talk about is Partisia Blockchain, a Web3-based public blockchain that delivers a unique privacy-enhancing technology by combining the features of blockchain technology with multi-party computation (MPC). Through this, Partisia allows enterprises to leverage decentralized technology while guaranteeing end-to-end data privacy and security.
Built by the founders of leading companies like Partisia.com, Instars.com, and Sepior.com – best known for selling commercial-grade MPC software to enterprises since 2008, the Partisia Blockchain is the result of more than four years of research and development to merge blockchain with MPC successfully.
By combining MPC technologies with blockchain, the Partisia team has added multiple security and privacy layers to the data that is already being generated and recorded in any blockchain’s distributed ledger. Partisia Blockchain’s MPC model distributes the computation operations across several individual parties to guarantee that there is no single point of failure. Since each party is treated as a singular entity that has zero knowledge of the other party’s data, it ensures that all such transactions can be recorded on the underlying blockchain network as immutable entries.
Most importantly, Partisia’s privacy-focused solution is blockchain agnostic. It offers seamless integration with other blockchains through built-in cross-chain accounts that introduce the concept of BYOC (Bring Your Own Coin), allowing users to pay for Partisia Blockchain’s service with other cryptocurrencies such as BTC or ETH. The platform leverages ZK (zero-knowledge) proof computations to secure on-chain, cross-chain, as well as off-chain transactions, making it well-positioned to become the go-to solution for data privacy in Web3.
Enabling Quantum-Resistant Smart Contract Development
Another project that is worth mentioning is the QANplatform blockchain network. This layer-1 hybrid blockchain is quantum-resistant and allows developers to build smart contracts, Dapps, DeFi products and protocols, NFTs, tokens, metaverse projects, and much more in any programming language.
Experts predict that quantum attacks, something that prominent blockchain networks like bitcoin and Ethereum are vulnerable to, will be possible in the next five years. As such, QANplatform’s industrial-grade business platform is designed to connect business and blockchain in an environment-friendly way while guaranteeing security from futuristic attacks.
The QANplatform blockchain network is not only 5G-friendly, but it also bypasses the limits of Ethereum and other existing blockchains in many ways. It is fully EVM compatible and offers seamless integration with a wide range of programming languages, including Linux Kernel-compatible languages, DevOps technology like Kubernetes, cloud platforms like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, as well as with indexing and oracle APIs like Band Protocol and Chainlink.
With an average cloud deployment time of five minutes, paired with quantum resistance and the PoR (Proof of Randomness) consensus mechanism, and energy efficiency, QANplatform is among the frontrunners in the race to become the best privacy-focused solution for Web3.
Adding Privacy To Both Network And Application Layers
Data privacy is one of the biggest problems across the current Web2 ecosystem. As centralized organizations took over the idea of the decentralized internet, the existing version of the internet has exposed billions of people worldwide to mass surveillance and data breaches.
To stop this from happening on Web3, Switzerland-based privacy startup Nym Technologies has developed an end-to-end privacy layer that facilitates private access features for Dapps and their users. The Nym network consists of a decentralized mixnet explorer and an anonymous credential crypto-based system designed to route network traffic in a way that makes it impossible for anyone to track metadata information, both on network and application levels.
Nym’s anonymous credential model and open-source mixnet technology provides developers and enterprises the required infrastructure for building Dapps (decentralized applications) that seamlessly anonymize data. At the same time, the underlying decentralized privacy mixnet is fully incentivized. It is designed to track the reputation of every participating node and reward nodes to maintain end-to-end data privacy.
The platform offers privacy-enhanced access to applications and services, both in terms of protecting communication metadata as well as privately proving an individual user’s “rights to use.” A consortium of industry leaders like Swisscom, Polychain, Binance, a16zCrypto, and DCG, among others, are part of Nym’s mixnet, making it one of the most promising privacy-focused solutions for both blockchain and traditional ecosystems.
