Kurt Nielsen on Partisia’s privacy-focused blockchain approach

0:01i'm ashton addison from event chain for investmentpitch media in the cryptocoin show and today on blockchain interviews we have kurt nielsen the president of the bartesia blockchain foundation kurt welcome to the show i'm excited for our discussion and it's a pleasure to have you here today thank you for being here thank you for thank you so let's kick off our discussion with a

0:22little bit of background on yourself uh your role in the company and you know how that really led to you getting involved in the blockchain industry with partisa okay yes sure so so my background is a bit of a mix of me as an entrepreneur and the researchers so my background is that i specialized in market design and design of information and data solutions and

0:46business development they're using advanced cryptography so for the past 15 years i've been collaborating with experts in distributed cryptography and co-founded a number of companies uh including patricia which was actually back in 2008 a pioneer in privacy preserving computation and sibia who's pioneer in key management also using distributed cryptography

1:11so so patricia you can that's where the name from fall comes from for patricia blockchain patricia blockchain is only two months old so but this is basically brings together all this knowledge and the the developer teams from these two companies patricia and sepia but there's a lot so this story with the background story is it's much longer so if you have time

1:37just to make it short i was actually working on on a phd in in market design when i heard about even dango who's famous for his work on on multi-party computation which is a also insured mpc which is a another distributed cryptography which has some similarities to blockchain and uh i found out that this was a perfect solution to a common problem in economics where you

2:06need a trustee to handle your private information in order to find the the right solutions so that goes for for market solution that goes for data solution it's very very broad and it was a bit the beginning of a fundraising for a landmark research and development project that resulted in the the first use of mpc in a commercial setting and this landmark achievement

2:34was also the starting point for for patricia so so that is basically where we started and and the team that we are bringing to patricia blockchain is is the one that we have built up through these the past 10 years so it's consisting of experts like like even damn go who's not just known for for npc but also for the merkle dango hash function that people might know

3:00and he even constructed or was co-founder of one of the first commercial crypto companies in the world cryptomatic uh back in the 80s and now part of the and chief cryptographer in the particular blockchain team together with the jasper bugs nielsen who is one of the most quoted researchers in this field of mpc and claudio orlando is also known for her for his work on

3:26on protocols and these three is working door-to-door with the two developer teams that have been building these uh commercial use of or commercial graded mpc and blockchain applications for for for quite some some time so this is the the team and and where we come from that's great kurt and that's quite the history uh being you know having this technology and now

3:51only recently here really combining it all together uh for the partesia blockchain can can you now that you have this new project on the go and you're really focusing on combining this all together for enterprise and commercial can you just give an overview of you know what are the current goals for partisan blockchain yeah thank you for the question so so so if

4:14we look at blockchains this has this great potential of disrupting of a disrupting platform a web 3.0 platform but if we still rely on on single point of trust when it comes to handling uh private information uh we don't believe that this disruption would have a this the the big potential impact so what we really need is to fix this and that is basically what we're aiming

4:37for uh no less uh so so particular blockchain is this web3.0 public blockchain built for trust transparency and privacy and and it's it's it's a more complete sort of decentralized platform that allows for a new sort of emerging set of applications that is utilizing private data

5:04and and really creating disruption by taking sort of handling the core problem of handling uh their private information and not just uh not just a simple operation but generic use of of of private information that's really interesting and you mentioned that you have history and distributed cryptography and now the partisa blockchain is

5:32integrating mpc multi-party computation for this security and privacy can can you explain is distributed cryptography different than mpc and are these two technologies something that hasn't been involved in blockchain at all before yeah so i'm talking about distributed cryptography which would cover both blockchain technologies and and mpc and and other types of uh

5:59cryptography where you where you distribute the the system in order to get this poverty of no single point of trust so so you want to have this blockchain properties both in in terms of of having immutable data but also having also to handle a private data and so so it is that we what we do here with this

6:24infrastructure is that we are building this for for privacy obviously and and and also for interoperability because that's kind of so we want to have or what we do is that we have a system of infrastructure that comes in and match the existing uh technology of the blockchain and allow us to collaborate with the existing blockchain solutions and we have done a

6:53number of things in in the way we constructed the blockchain in order to exactly to facilitate for this so one thing is to to provide generic privacy computation which is what we have been doing for for the past decade and and even longer another thing is to to not come and introduce a new uh coin to the industry but allow for for all existing liquid coins to come in and be used as

7:19means of payment on this and that we can use by by this privacy technology where you can manage private key you can handle them you can even create private keys and that allows us to to do all types of collaborative services with existing blockchain solutions that's great and i was researching into partisa i see that right now you're in the test

7:46net phase and you mentioned you've been working on it for a little bit of time now can can you talk about what has been the most challenging part of this phase and you know what are the next steps in terms of launching the mainnet yes so so we have been uh so i think in twos what's by the launch of ethereum i think then that's where we started to think about how we

8:11could actually combine mpc and then blockchain technologies because from from the outside it looks like like a perfect match you have the transparency uh with the with the blockchain and you have the handling of confidential information with the distributed with mpc and both of these technologies are distributed so so they there seems to be a lot of

8:34complimentary complimentarities so we started to think about this and we was approached by a number of companies uh doing the the hive in in 2017 and started to build solution for for data exchanges and also for financial order matching and that was sort of the the starting point that was yeah in the beginning of 2017 and uh this sort of led stepwise to

9:00a complete sort of blockchain infrastructure that has uh npc as it it's as it called as in the call of the technology uh so so that was the starting point and we had the first full version in 2019 september 2019 commercial great solution that we we were at that time selling to to people who was building applications

9:30on top of this data solutions and auction solutions and then we have been working with regulators in order to bring this to the blockchain community in a sound way and that's what we have been succeeded with recently and uh the entire background for the creation of the patricia blockchain so so we have the test net and it's sort of building on this uh already commercial

9:55grade basic version 1.0 but but so so now we just or not just but now we need to to build these governance system into this in order for this to to function as a web 3.0 or a blockchain system a decentralized government system definitely and i also read that your team recently closed 2.6 million dollars in private funding congratulations on that that's quite the

10:24achievement you know with that raise now finished and you're focusing on development what what are the main focuses on you know making sure you manage and use the capital is it mainly just developing and getting to the main net is the main focus and are there other things as well yes so so this was a a great start so as i mentioned we're only a two two months

10:46old as a foundation so so this sort of gave us a head start and and we had the opportunity to to do exactly what we planning to do so and the plan is to raise a lot more funding for this project and that's what we that's what we're we're doing we we have developing at full speed and uh continuing the develop or the inclusion of more contributors especially people

11:17who can see the an idea in in running the notes in a in a network like this and and building applications that can utilize the privacy and the interoperability that that we offer so that that engagement of of uh large strategic partners will also guide our strategic focus and we we use the test net in order to to do this so that would be a very sort of strategic

11:46very strategic focus for us to to bring in the the latest development at an earlier stage and to to test the the the value of the different applications and then we are working towards mainnet and um but and we're still we're still sort of keeping the the exact uh dates for when we are launching uh so sin and keep that for a upfront

12:15discussion with the with the partners that will include uh during the next uh months no that's good to know now i know you're fairly early on and once the platform launches there's a lot more work to be done in terms of the long-term success of partesia what do you think would be one of the major key success factors into achieving long-term success

12:43yes so so um so the next half a years of work will probably determine the success of this project in order for us to succeed in including the right partners and getting a head start in in building this uh this network uh so so that's what we are prioritizing uh to get the right partners included and to focus on the the right

13:10application so so we believe that we are contributing to the to the basic technology in the blockchain ecosystem but but at the end of the day all the value is created by applications so it's of course highly important for us to move into the right applications and but i think we have a good sort of starting point for this because this is basically what we have been

13:35been doing with with partners for for the past 10 years building solutions for organizing citizens to to use this technology to to do to both give sort of decentralized control and privacy and also at the same time allow people to bring data together in order to create value which seems to be like contradicting but but that's exactly what this technology

14:01can can do and also these other types of applications where you have competing companies collaborating i think just to mention one is fraud detection financial fraud detection where you have a in the traditional financial system you you you everything is cooked down to it transactions between senders and receivers between two banks so but they are not allowed to share as

14:29enough information so due to competition constraints regulation as well as the data regulation so that prevent them from from detecting fraud but that's exactly what we can do with npc we can allow these competing companies to share more information to to to do a better assessment on on the individual uh transaction and then combine them and and and

14:54create these fraud patterns that at the end of the day reveal financial fraud so just one example of how this technology can open up for new types of collaborations that solve real problems definitely and fraud is a major issue continues to grow with all the people jumping online right now as well so that's definitely a key point to focus on now we're running short on time kurt for

15:22our interview but if there are viewers or developers or investors or anybody else who's interested in following along with the progress of partisa and watching for the mainnet launch what's the best way for them to get involved with the community and to learn more yes so we have a home page uh patriciablockchain.com and we are on the various social networks and

15:44we also have a a first post on medium we have a medium account where we'll keep on posting and you'll have you'll see uh even down go and yes papouche nielsen and talking about the technology and how we how we combine the technology and blockchain etc uh so that's that's the place to go to know more about the uh the project sounds great i will leave

16:08those links in the description box below for the viewers it's been a pleasure speaking with you all the best with partisa moving forward and let's follow up in the near future likewise thanks a lot for letting me thank you