What is MPC?
Multi-Party Computation (MPC) is a cryptographic technique that enables multiple parties to collectively compute a function while keeping their individual inputs private. In other words, participants can collaborate to perform computations without revealing their specific data to each other. MPC ensures that no single participant learns more than they should, even though they’re collectively computing a result. It’s commonly used for secure data analysis, privacy-preserving computations, and cryptographic protocols in scenarios where trust among participants is limited or absent.
dWallet Labs has introduced Tiresias, a groundbreaking development that brings scalable Multi-Party Computation (MPC) to the Web3 realm. Specializing in blockchain technology cybersecurity, dWallet Labs aims to revolutionize the execution of MPC by enabling massive-scale threshold Paillier settings, even accommodating thousands of participants in real-world scenarios.
MPC and threshold cryptography have become crucial tools for various financial institutions and Web3 users. These technologies enhance security by eliminating the risks associated with single private keys and offer a trustless approach to safeguarding assets. Unlike conventional setups that rely on a single private key, the Web3 MPC protocols, such as Tiresias, generate ECDSA signatures using a threshold of parties, bolstering decentralization.
Presently, state-of-the-art Threshold ECDSA protocols, including Lindell’s, Gennaro and Goldfeder’s, and MPC-CMP, find utility in diverse solutions such as custodians (e.g., Fireblocks, Copper), wallet providers (e.g., Coinbase, ZenGo), and distributed networks (e.g., Thorchain, Qredo). However, these protocols have limitations in terms of either requiring a trusted setup or being confined to a small participant pool, hindering the full potential of MPC for Web3.
Yehonatan Cohen Scaly, the Chief Technology Officer at dWallet Labs and Co-Founder of Odsy Network, emphasizes that the essence of Web3 lies in strong decentralization, making it imperative to address the constraints of existing MPC protocols. The aspiration is to achieve trustlessness through robust decentralization, rendering both limited participant counts and trust in a single entity unacceptable.
The existing landscape demonstrates that the promise of MPC for Web3 is yet to be fully realized. Even projects like THORChain, which allows the involvement of up to 20 participants with a threshold of 23, still fall short of achieving true decentralization.
A notable hindrance in implementing MPC within a permissionless network setting (e.g., ICP, THORChain, Lit Protocol) is the requirement for unicast communication between participants. In essence, each participant must communicate with every other, resulting in quadratic complexity growth (O(n^2)) as participants increase, imposing a stringent participant limit.
Dolev Mutzari, Vice President of Research at dWallet Labs, highlights the transformative potential of Tiresias. By substituting unicast communication with broadcast communication, Tiresias preserves the blockchain ethos while significantly reducing communication complexity to linear growth (O(n)). This advancement opens doors for threshold protocols involving hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of participants, redefining the landscape of trustless execution and decentralization in the Web3 domain.