TECH Talks - Meet Ivan Damgård, Co-founder and Chief Cryptographer-Partisia Blockchain

My name is Ivan Damgård. I'm the Chief Cryptographer and also co-founder of Partisia Blockchain and professor of computer science, Aarhus University. I'm a cryptographer and an expert in secure multiparty computation. I was one of the founders of this field back in the late 80s where we started doing multiparty computation when nobody knew that this was possible at all, back in the day, when the internet barely existed. It was only a theoretical endeavor. Back in 2007-2008, we did the world's first commercial application of MPC, multiparty computation. This convinced us that the commercial potential in MPC was quite a breakthrough. We started Partisia to develop MPC for commercial applications. We later figured out the amazing potential of blockchain and combining these things -that's why we founded Partisia Blockchain.
What is multi party computation? We can begin by thinking about the fact that we can send data on the internet securely via secure connection from A to B with encrypted data. That means that anybody who looks at this data will not understand anything. But the fact is you can do much more encrypted data than just sending it from A to B. You can also compute on encrypted data. Example: people who work in the same sector want to find out their average salary. Nobody wants to just reveal to everyone else for privacy reasons. With MPC, everybody supplies in encrypted form their salary. Collectively we work on these encryptions to get a new form of gibberish, which is actually the encryption of the average salary. It's set up so that if we collaborate we can decrypt that. Now we all know the average salary, but because everybody has to agree on what we decrypt, then you actually retain control over your own data that you put into the computation in the first place.
Blockchain is super important for MPC because MPC is being used in a bigger landscape where lots of different people might be interested in supplying their data into a computation, and lots of people might be interested in supplying the computing power to help do secure computation, so you need coordination and blockchain is a perfect vehicle for doing this. Partisia Blockchain is designed to be a vehicle for secure computation.
One concrete use case: you want to know how your business compares to others? In terms of production costs, salaries, productivity, whatever. That's typically something everybody is interested in. But, it's a service that nobody wants to deliver data to because the people you're comparing yourself to, they are also your competitors, so you definitely don't want them to learn your private data. Multiparty computation on the blockchain allows you to create, in a seamless way, a system where everybody can put their performance data into the system, do an analysis that will output to you and only to you how you compare to the general performance in this business. Everybody benefits without having a single point of trust, a single point of attack where all the data is collected. We know that, especially in Europe, it's very limited what you can do with personal data. But as long as they are encrypted, you can do much more. With such a system as we're building, you can actually, as a private person, donate your data to science and have it be used for the greater good without risking your privacy. I think in the future we'll see more of this.
What excites me the most is how multiparty computation combines with blockchain. When we founded Partisia back in 2008, maybe the world wasn't quite ready for multiparty computation because enough people have to understand what this technology is, what it can do for you. This finally happened over the last few years when blockchain development caught people's attention to security. We have the best expertise that is around both in cryptography and in the blockchain technology. We do things open source, we peer review everything. So in terms of the standard quality control, so to speak, and also in some scientific background, I think we're doing really well.
One distinguishing feature of Partisia Blockchain is, again, that is based on secure computation. What that means is that if you're putting your confidential data into the system, It can be set up so that either you or someone you trust retain control over that data, so even if some other participant in the system get hacked and get everything stolen, your data will not be stolen. The community that's building up very rapidly around Partisia Blockchain is a very imaginative and creative bunch of people, constantly coming up with ideas. We have this very active and blossoming cryptography research group at the University, very successful in research. It's very satisfying to see that then when these people get their PhDs, they go out into society and do great things. Some in academia, but also some here in our offices at Partisia!

[@flemmingsorensen1603]

Great. Simply great. Can’t wait for launch.

[@thisfireburn]

Love the introductory videos by Partisia Team! Keep them coming $MPC

[@djbond001]

Keep up the great work! 🙏

[@coskanyetginer7442]

Great team👍

[@OneWingedFantasy]

I'm loving these videos. Can't wait for the AMA on Thursday 💪🏼

[@MrBillyF1]

Keep these videos coming! There's always a lot to learn, very interesting. Thanks

[@niklasr.4468]

Nice Video

[@mustafaatlhan4906]

Why is there no turkish subtitle option in the videos? Don't you think it's a good idea to appeal to Turkish crypto investors? Please add Turkish subtitles to the videos as soon as possible.