The new technology hotspot in 2021, privacy computing needs to be paid attention in advance

On October 20, Gartner released 9 important strategic technology trends that need to be explored in 2021, among which Privacy-Enhancing Computation (Privacy-Enhancing Computation) is impressively listed, becoming a rookie among the annual important strategic technology trends.

Gartner believes that half of large enterprise organizations will use privacy-enhanced computing to process data in untrusted environments and multi-party data analysis use cases by 2025. Enterprise organizations should evaluate the requirements for personal data transfer when starting to identify privacy-enhanced computing candidates , data monetization, fraud analysis, and other data processing activities for highly sensitive data use cases.

As a relatively niche strategic technology trend, "private computing" has gradually emerged in the cutting-edge development and exploration of the blockchain industry. So what exactly is "private computing"? What role can it play in the blockchain and the future digital economy?

According to the definition of China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, privacy computing refers to the information technology that analyzes and calculates data and can verify the calculation results under the premise of ensuring that the data provider does not disclose sensitive data. It is mainly divided into two categories: cryptography and trusted hardware. big field.

Injective will focus on "Injective Chain goes online to support futures" in 2022, in order to continue to pave the way for the development of a new Web3 economy: On January 1st, Injective released its 2021 review and future road, and Injective will continue to open up new In 2022, we will focus on: continue to build a decentralized derivatives exchange; integrate oracles; increase liquidity; introduce more trading pairs and market types; develop the potential of Injective Chain, which can support futures, Synthetic assets, options, etc.; driving global adoption; high-performance interoperable smart contracts, integrating multi-chain smart contracts CosmWasm into Injective; permissionless Web3 applications on Injective; cross-chain integration. [2022/1/1 8:18:18]

In layman's terms, privacy computing is a technology that protects private information without affecting data usage. In the process of "balancing the contradiction between data security and data value realization", cryptographic technologies such as secure multi-party computing, homomorphic encryption, and zero-knowledge proof play a key role. The core idea is to design special encryption algorithms and Protocol, which supports direct calculation on encrypted data (that is, without touching the plaintext content-zce of the data) to obtain the required calculation results.

ZB Innovation Think Tank releases the annual forecast report "Digital Currency (2021): Analysis of Digital Finance and Market Economic Change Trends" Forecast Research Report (hereinafter referred to as the "Report").

The "Report" is divided into seven sections. The first two sections mainly make an overall analysis of the background of digital currency and the market opportunities of digital currency in 2021. The third to sixth sections focus on the impact of the central bank's digital currency on market economic reform and development. The potential impact trend of the development of digital finance, while also exploring the internal mechanism of digital currency on macroeconomic regulation, sorting out the core value of digital currency for consumption upgrading in my country, and the last section points out what the inclusive application of digital currency will face in the future Problems and challenges, so that all walks of life have a deeper understanding of the development trend of digital currency in the future. [2021/1/18 16:27:12]

Privacy computing and Bitcoin are somewhat similar, both "standing on the shoulders of giants" - although the birth and development time is not long, but the key technical components, such as secure multi-party Cryptography technologies such as computing, homomorphic encryption, and zero-knowledge proofs were proposed as early as the 1980s and 1990s, so the technology has been relatively mature, and has now entered the stage of practical application in various fields.

Bittrex announced that it will close the XRP market trading at 8:00 on January 16, 2021: On December 30, the encryption exchange Bittrex officially announced that it will close the XRP market trading at 8:00 on January 16, 2021 Beijing time. At the same time, the four major trading pairs of BTC-XRP, ETH-XRP, USDT-XRP and USD-XRP will also be suspended. Until further notice, users can continue to access their XRP wallets on Bittrex for the time being. [2020/12/30 16:02:54]

Gartner specifically emphasized that as global data protection regulations mature, the privacy and breach risks faced by chief information officers in various regions are greater than ever before. Under this trend, unlike the common static data security control, "privacy computing" can protect the data in use while ensuring confidentiality or privacy, so the prospect is broad:

With the help of "privacy computing" technology, data can be "available but not visible". The data owner can safely open the data to the outside world, so that "frozen" data becomes "flowing" data "oil", releasing the value of data.

"Bitcoin has truly realized the sanctity of personal property from a technical point of view for the first time", which is also the key to the digital currency revolution represented by Bitcoin - giving everyone a real possession of their own" financial rights” possibility.

2020 halving currency market report: Jinse Finance data shows that 6 of the 10 halved currencies rose and 4 fell today. The top three increases are: BEAM ($0.63, +2.50%), HPT ($0.0075, +1.51%), BCD ($0.70, +1.06%); the top three decliners are: BSV ($247.90, -1.75%), BCH ($330.44, -1.24%), ZEC ($51.13, -0.93%). [2020/3/4]

Similarly, with the development of the Internet, especially the advent of the WEB 3.0 era, the urgency of the issue of personal data rights has gradually emerged. Under the huge amount of data and the corresponding protection requirements, "privacy computing" with safe and reliable information protection has undoubtedly become a key part of the digital "new infrastructure" solution - as a solution to the problem of trusted computing in the case of data opacity "Privacy computing" has played an important role in helping the data privatization movement.

However, privacy computing has limited effects in confirming data ownership and activating data sharing flows, and new tools need to be introduced to further develop its functions. At the same time, the distributed nature of the blockchain and the Token mechanism built on it can just make up for the limitations of "privacy computing", and the two are almost a natural match.

Dynamic| It is estimated that the global blockchain supply chain market size will reach 9.85291 billion US dollars by 2025: ResearchAndMarkets released a report that in 2017, the global blockchain supply chain market size was 93.16 million US dollars, and it is expected to reach 9.85291 billion US dollars by 2025 , with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 80.2% between 2018 and 2025. (Globe Newswire)[2019/9/2]

At present, there are some star blockchain projects that focus on mining in this area, such as Phala Network, a well-known privacy computing protocol based on blockchain and TEE technology in China, which applies privacy computing to the blockchain, which increases to a certain extent It not only improves the non-tamperability and verifiability of privacy calculation results, but also increases the confidentiality of data on the blockchain. It has also become one of the mainstream technology integration directions.

Sun Lilin, the founder and CEO of Matrix Element, once defined the nature of privacy computing: Like blockchain, privacy computing is not a single technology, so if blockchain and privacy computing are used as technologies, it may be difficult to go down. Privacy computing should be an important part of the infrastructure, or it should be the carrier of the infrastructure itself, and it is inherently an operation-oriented business and business, rather than a separate "technology".

At present, many data sharing solutions combined with "privacy computing" technology have been born in various industries, and have been applied in financial risk control, precision marketing, smart medical care, insurance claims and other fields.

At the same time, represented by DeFi, the blockchain is currently in the process of gradually integrating and developing into financial and other industries, and privacy protection under massive assets has naturally become a rigid need—combining blockchain functions with secure and private computing Combined, we can build a better DeFi with scalability and privacy protection, and at the same time, we can build emerging data assets, realize safe and convenient data sharing and interaction, and create a reliable and responsible data economy.

At present, there are also some star blockchain projects that focus on the mining of privacy computing, such as PlatON, a well-known privacy computing public chain in China, Phala Network, a privacy computing protocol based on blockchain and TEE technology, and Oasis, which has recently launched its mainnet.

Still taking Phala Network as an example, it first forces users to have 100% ownership of personal data from the protocol layer, and utilizes the distributed nature of blockchain to allow all individuals or organizations to freely access Phala Network, which is activated by introducing Token media The entire network makes it a free market that can be traded and flowed.

And Phala's entire network is a permissionless privacy computing service. On the one hand, this avoids the defect that the TEE computing scheme will be unavailable, and on the other hand, it also avoids that when hardware giants such as Intel do evil, the network remains safe, because the nodes that make up the entire Phala network are scattered all over the world and can Free entry and exit.

At the same time, Phala is a decentralized network, and the running program is guaranteed to be trustless by smart contracts. This also means that no centralized institution or organization can control user data. In addition, it also solves the problem of matching the data scale with the trusted computing requirements: that is, how much data is generated, and how much demand is there for computing.

That is to say, the Phala protocol, which adopts the blockchain + privacy computing scheme, is trying to achieve to some extent to allow ordinary users to truly own their own "personal data rights" - to regain control from monopoly giants and return ownership to data owner.

From this point of view, it is necessary for us to re-examine the possible uses of blockchain and blockchain based on the foundation of superimposed privacy computing technology. The combination of privacy computing and blockchain meets more complex and changeable business needs. Especially for various scenarios of data storage/certification/sharing/transactions, realizing the transformation from the Internet of Information to the Internet of Value.

Since the beginning of this year, whether it is Grayscale’s continued large-scale “coin accumulation” or Square and PayPal’s emerging support for digital currency payments, the “high-profile” layout or entry of these foreign institutions has made the Bitcoin and blockchain industries welcome. An unprecedented moment of glory has come.

In fact, in recent years, foreign technology giants have been deploying the privacy computing industry. In April 2019, two new patent applications issued by Microsoft indicated that it is using the Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) in its blockchain products. In August, Google also announced the launch of a new multi-party secure computing (MPC) open source library to Collaborate on data in a private and secure manner.

On the other hand, in China, financial institutions and technology giants are relatively "low-key" at the "currency" level. The few information disclosures are mostly concentrated on technology research and development, especially at the application level, and are committed to breaking through the bottleneck of large-scale and reliable applications. Among them, privacy computing Technology is also one of the main directions of tackling difficulties in China.

Ant Financial, Tencent Cloud, and Baidu have launched their own multi-party secure computing (MPC) products in 2019, and companies such as Alibaba, WeBank, and JD.com have also formed certain advantages in their respective technical fields.

The test network (codename: Vendetta) of the third phase of Phala (POC-3) was also officially launched on November 15, officially allowing free registration of private computing nodes, and any device integrated with SGX functions can run POC-3 client The terminal joins the Phala network, which is the backbone of domestic exploration in the direction of "privacy computing".

At the same time, my country has always attached great importance to data privacy at the legal level. As early as November 2016, the "Network Security Law of the People's Republic of China" emphasized the importance of data privacy. In 2019, the Cyberspace Administration of China released the "Data Security Management Measures (Draft for Comment)". In July this year, the 20th meeting of the Standing Committee of the 13th National People's Congress announced the "Data Security Law of the People's Republic of China (Draft)", which further improved the legal provisions on data privacy in my country.

People are always accustomed to overestimating the development of a technology within two years, but underestimating its possible revolutionary impact in the next ten years. When the tide of the future data era is raging, how to make huge data elements into manageable assets may be the most explosive direction for privacy computing technology. Let us wait and see.

Have you paid attention to information related to Web3.0 and privacy computing, and how do you see its future development? Welcome to the message area to write your views.

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