MPC Explained: The Bold New Vision for Securing Crypto Money

For too long, the most reliable means of protecting the private keys that afford the holder control over an underlying crypto asset have been too clunky, insufficiently versatile, or difficult to implement on scale.

The beauty of the KZen model is that security is no longer a function of one or more entities maintaining total control over a distinct private key of their own - the core point of vulnerability in cryptocurrency management until now.

The private key that executes the transaction is thus a collectively generated value; at no point is a single, vulnerable computer responsible for an actual key.

KZen is not the only provider of MPC solutions for blockchain key management.

Unbound, another Israeli company, is going after the enterprise marketplace with its MPC solutions for crypto security.

It makes a repeated case for why MPC is superior to the two preferred approaches to crypto security of the moment: hardware security modules, on which hardware wallets like Ledger and Trezor are built, and multi-signature technologies, which are favored by exchanges.

If KZen and Unbound are to be believed, MPC solutions resolve both the hot-versus-cold trade-off in key management and the dilemma of self-versus-managed custody.

Bringing them into a transactable, online environment poses an overly cumbersome challenge when you want to use those keys to send money.

To a large extent those risks come down to the fact that, regardless of the surrounding security model's sophistication, the all-important keys are always sitting at single points of failure.

If you squint hard enough, and think about how this technology's prospects for better key management can be married to Enigma's vision for an MPC-based secret contract layer and to the broader march toward decentralized, interoperable asset exchanges, a compelling vision of true peer-to-peer blockchain-based commerce starts to emerge.