Organizations look toward multiparty computation to advance Web3

Protecting user data and private keys is crucial as Web3 advances. Yet, the number of hacks that have occurred within the Web3 space in 2022 alone has been monumental, proving that additional security measures, along with greater forms of decentralization, are still required.

As this becomes obvious, a number of organizations have started leveraging multiparty computation, or MPC, to ensure privacy and confidentiality for Web3 platforms. MPC is a cryptographic protocol that utilizes an algorithm across multiple parties. Andrew Masanto, co-founder of Nillion — a Web3 startup specializing in decentralized computation — told Cointelegraph that MPC is unique because no individual party can see the other parties’ data, yet the parties are able to jointly compute an output: “It basically allows multiple parties to run computations without sharing any data.”

Masanto added that MPC has a history that runs parallel to blockchain. “Around the same time that blockchain was conceptualized, a sibling technology purpose-built for processing and computation within a trustless environment was being developed, which is multiparty computation,” he said. It has also been noted that the theory behind MPC was conceived in the early 1980s. Yet, given the complexity of this cryptographic method, practical uses of MPC were delayed.

Understanding how MPC will transform Web3

It was only recently that blockchain-based platforms began to implement MPC to ensure data confidentiality without revealing sensitive information. Vinson Lee Leow, chief ecosystem officer at Partisia Blockchain — a Web3 infrastructure platform focused on security — told Cointelegraph that MPC is a perfect ideological match for the blockchain economy.

Unlike public blockchain networks, he noted that MPC solves for confidentiality through a network of nodes that computes directly on encrypted data with zero knowledge about the information. Given this, companies focused on digital asset security began leveraging MPC in 2020 to ensure the security of users’ private keys. Yet, as Web3 develops, more companies are starting to implement MPC to create a greater level of decentralized privacy for various use cases. Masanto added:

“The evolution of Web2 to Web3 focuses on creating methods where people and organizations can collaboratively work on different data sets in a manner that respects privacy and confidentiality while maintaining compliance. Blockchains are not purpose-designed for this because they are typically inherently public, and smart contracts are often run by one node and then confirmed by others. MPC breaks down the computation across the network of nodes, making it a truly decentralized form of computation.”

The promise of MPC has since piqued the interest of Coinbase, which recently announced its Web3 application functionality. Coinbase’s new wallet and DApp functionalities are operated with MPC in order to secure the privacy of senders and receivers while ensuring the accuracy of a transaction.

Rishi Dean, director of product management at Coinbase, explained in a blog post that MPC allows users to have a dedicated, secure on-chain wallet. “This is due to the way this wallet is set up, which allows the ‘key’ to be split between you and Coinbase,” he wrote. Dean added that this provides a greater level of security for users, noting that if they lose access to their device, a DApp wallet is still safe since Coinbase can assist in the recovery.

While Coinbase released this feature in early May 2022, crypto wallet provider ZenGo was equipped with MPC from the company’s inception in 2018. Talking with Cointelegraph, Tal Be’ery, co-founder and chief technology officer of ZenGo, said that the wallet applies MPC for disrupted key generation and signing, also known as threshold signature scheme (TSS). He explained that the key is broken up into two “secret shares” split between the user and the company server.

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