Partisia Blockchain Foundation Shows Momentum with Polygon Integration, New COO

The Partisia Blockchain Foundation brings multi-party, zero-knowledge computing to Polygon via its unified smart contract technology, enabling developers to build new blockchain-based applications. This comes on the heels of the appointment of former Cardano Foundation head Hinrich Pfeifer as COO.

The Partisia Blockchain Foundation, an independent non-profit supporting the development of the world’s ultimate zero-knowledge blockchain, announced the completion of its Mainnet v3.0 integration into Polygon, an Ethereum scaling protocol bringing millions to web3. The completion came just days after it announced the appointment of Hinrich Pfeifer to the position of Chief Operations Officer.

Existing smart contracts, from the very first smart contract in 2009 with the launch of Bitcoin, have been isolated into two separate and vastly different types — public and private — limiting the expansion of blockchain applications. The more common type, public or visible, smart contracts provide weaker privacy protection, which poses a problem for use cases that require maintaining discrete health or financial records. While private smart contracts protect against external interference or malicious activity, they cannot be easily audited or verified by third parties.

The foundation’s mainnet v3.0 integration unlocks Partisia’s privacy-preserving computational infrastructure and a new type of smart contract – allowing Polygon developers to build use cases that require data confidentiality and privacy while using a public blockchain.

“This technology will drastically transform the way businesses and individuals interact with each other,” said Brian Gallagher, co-founder of Partisia Blockchain.

This technology, which leverages Partisia Blockchain’s unified private and public smart contracts and zero-knowledge multi-party computations, is sure to play a role in the future of the industry as developers gain the potential to build hundreds of polygon-driven use cases. This opens the door to a number of possibilities, including:

• Handling of private documents and content – The ability to keep aspects of the contract private while opening it up to public verification is critical in cases such as medical and health data, financial identity or credit scores, etc.
• Decentralized search engines – Today, ad-based search engine models expose users to a poor experience, and to the risk of falling victim to click-bait, fake news, scams and other malware. As an alternative, the “Better Internet Search” initiative has integrated the Partisia Blockchain’s unified smart contract to offer a new, ad-free experience and produce search results without collecting users’ private data. Encrypted data is never decrypted and all product information provided has been calculated with MPC to be equally relevant to the user’s experience without personal data ever being decrypted – this is the power of zk calculation.
• Monetizable data on decentralized social networks – In the short term, the better data protection of zero-knowledge MPC makes use of users’ most valuable but sensitive data in a prudent and regular-compliant manner. In the long run, this has the potential to change the power structures operating in today’s internet economy and allow for more competition at the application and service level. A good example is the “Data for Good” platform designed to allow anyone to donate data without revealing personal information, using MPC and blockchain to strike the right balance between confidentiality and transparency.
• Trade Finance industry and decentralized exchanges – The first large-scale and commercial use of MPC was a decentralized exchange carried out in 2008 by the team behind Partisia Blockchain followed by a series of MPC-based auctions in energy, finance and telecom. Partisia’s initial focus is to bridge different blockchains and allow users to seamlessly move data and tokens from one blockchain and security paradigm to another. The goal is to increase participation in existing DeFi solutions and lower the barrier to bringing DeFi to traditional markets.
• Private Auctions – With increasingly complicated supply chains and niche products, pricing and auctions are becoming an integral part of many markets. In a unified smart contract, it is possible to keep track of buyers and sellers and the resulting trades while bids remain confidential. Furthermore, the zero-knowledge privacy aspect MPC brings can also help eliminate the possibility of shill bidding, the practice of artificially increasing the price of an item through dishonest bidding.

“The integration of Partisia Blockchain’s unified smart contracts based on zero-knowledge, multi-party computation opens countless new and exciting opportunities for all Polygon developers,” said Antoni Martin, Polygon Enterprise Lead.

This integration and recent COO appointment adds to Partisia Blockchain Foundation’s momentum, as the foundation doubled its staff over the past year, with senior hires such as Iulia Mihailescu (CMO) and Jennifer de Broglie (Director of Thought Leadership).

Hinrich brings his vast expertise as the Cardano Foundation’s Secretary General, and in the development of both the Cardano Foundation’s global team and its protocol and blockchain adoption. Along with his co-founders, Hinrich will oversee the Partisia Blockchain Foundation’s operations, strategy and vision as the foundation scales blockchain expansion and its on-chain solutions to issues of counterfeiting, digital identity and trade finance gaps.

Hinrich’s appointment compliments the foundation’s progress as he spearheads the foundation’s rapid expansion to “deliver the promise that multi-party computing offers to diverse industries.”

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