Divi Podcast #96: Kurt Nielsen of Partisia Blockchain

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Starting In Cryptography

Kurt’s background is in economics, earning his Ph.D. in game theory and auction design. While in this space, Kurt became aware of Multi-party computation (MPC). MPC is a distributed technology that has significant blockchain potential.

After four years of research and development, Partisia conducted their first MPC in 2008, a full year before bitcoin was announced. Partisia exists to push MPC to all kinds of use cases, from blockchain and cryptography, to auctions!

MPC Use Cases

MPC is a generic distributed computer that solves for privacy and can be used in any use case where you want to control private information.

• Distributed cryptography: One example would be in institutions, like an auction where you have an auctioneer, you could remove the auctioneer with distributed cryptography, so a piece of software.

• Collaboration in a competitive environment: It can also be used where competitors are collaborating, such as competing banks that are collaborating around how to detect fraud in financial systems.

• Private key security: Another use is in key management which is very important. Back in 2013, they began using MPC in private key management.

What’s Next?

Kurt says there is so much to innovate on, but they’re mostly looking into new types of businesses, exchanging data differently, and collaborating in a different way. Current regulations restrict collaboration, and they’ve been working with these types of solutions for some time. Kurt expects to see the boundaries continue to move, and looks forward to getting regulators to approve of new types of collaboration.

To Learn More

Check out partisiablockchain.com or on their social media platforms!