News - Partisia

July 2022

Sepior acquired by Blockdaemon

Blockdaemon, a leading institutional-grade blockchain infrastructure company, has acquired Sepior. Sepior was established by Partisia in 2013 as a dedicated effort to commercialize “MPC based key management” and this is a brief look back at the history of Sepior.

Shortly after Sepior was established, Nicolaj Højer Nielsen became CEO and led the initial fundraising where SEED Capital and a handful of angel investors brought in the initial seed capital. In collaboration with the first customers, Sepior received a prestigious EU grant of around DKK 18 million, which allowed the company to test a number of ways to package MPC based key management as-a-Service covering different parts of the value chain. In 2016 Ahmet Tuncay replaced Nicolaj as CEO to continue the search for the most valuable product market fit with a Californian based sales and marketing team.

A significant change came about in 2017 with a strategic investment by the large Japanese fintech company SBI. This surprising lead came from Tora.com that was building MPC and blockchain based “financial order matching” with Partisia and SBI was one of the initial customers. SBI was leading the construction of a large government supported crypto exchange in Japan and MPC based key management turned out to be the missing brick and a perfect match. The lead turned quickly into a strategic investment and a new dedicated focus on blockchain and crypto assets.

Meanwhile, SBI has solved the key management challenge and Sepior has now evolved to address new challenges within blockchain and WEB 3.0 networks. The Sepior founders and employees are excited to continue the positioning of MPC as a core digital infrastructure in collaboration with Blockdaemon.

June 2022

Partisia Blockchain fully operational

Partisia Blockchain was successfully launched on May 31st 2022 with the so-called Token Generation Event. Shortly after, a public sale finalized the initial fundraising and brought the total funds raised to approx. USD 54,2 millions. By the end of June version 3.0 of the entire network was launched and the network and team is now ready to enhance the adoption of the network.

Version 3.0 includes a lot of improvements and new features, but the two most important features are the capability to use the new MPC protocols with the unified public and private smart contracts and the second bridge integration to the Polygon network.

The unified smart contract language is a major achievement that opens up for the many use cases of MPC in the blockchain ecosystem and beyond. With this in place the balanced approach to privacy becomes very obvious. The Public part provides full transparency about the private computation that safeguard the users confidential input to MPC computations. Also, all of the complexities in selecting nodes, using the right protocols, optimizing (with pre-processing etc.) is automatically handled by the Partisia Blockchain network and orchestration of MPC. A major first step towards comprehensive and regulatory compliant use of MPC in all parts of the internet economy.

The Integration with Polygon brings in USDC as means of payment on the Partisia Blockchain and brings the full use of MPC to all Polygon developers with moving there existing applications of change means of payment. This is another major achievement that confirms the build in business model on how to integrate Partisia Blockchain with blockchain ecosystem in general.

December 2021

Partisia Blockchain soft launched

Partisia is developing the Partisia Blockchain for the Partisia Blockchain Foundation and this is an overall status after about a year.

Based on a successful code auditing, we soft launched the initial mainnet version of Partisia Blockchain on December 17th 2021. The initial deployment runs with 4 shards and a new shard is just one transaction away, which makes the blockchain truly scalable. This version of the network will stepwise test the different properties, such as token bridges for “Bring Your Own Coin” (BYOC) and the first initial private smart contracts to remotely control and automatically execute MPC-as-a-Service. In parallel the code base is open sourced, and a final bug bounty campaign is initiated prior to mainnet launch.

By the end of 2021, the project has raised USD 42,5 million and the current test of mainnet also tests the genesis block and allocation of the MPC tokens. The token buyers and contributors are part of the network and work on developing the initial applications and run nodes on Partisia Blockchain among other things.

Partisia Blockchain has a three tier approach to go-to-market for the network;
1) tapping into existing networks e.g. supported by BYOC,
2) a launch pad for applications e.g. supported by ERC-20 token equivalence,
3) SDG flagship projects emphasizing the value-added by Partisia Blockchain.
Two examples of the initial SDG flagship projects are; NFT based fundraising for NGOs (global partners will be disclosed later) and a solution to combat counterfeit medicine in developing countries. The latter involves close collaboration with the African Continental Free Trade Area.

December 2021

Combat Counterfeit Medicine

Partisia Blockchain and Partisia join OriginAll in developing a blockchain solution to address counterfeit medicine and tailored healthcare support through a stable coin. The solution combine OriginAll’s existing solution and Partisia Blockchain as foundation for tailored healthcare support using a tailored stable coin and counterfeit assessment of scanned medicine. The project works initially with selected countries through a signed agreement with the African Continental Free Trade Area – a framework agreement with 54 countries or over 1.3 billion people.

The privacy-preserving technology that comes with Partisia Blockchain is used to both protect the individual patient as well as to enable competing companies to collaborate with sensitive corporate data – both are needed to fight counterfeit medicine. Altogether, the project allows us to prove the power of Web 3.0 put to work to save lives.

November 2021

Extending the Management Team

Partisia has extended the management team with Jesper Balman Gravgaard. Jesper will be heading the smart contract language group at Partisia. The smart contract language group is developing verifiable smart contract languages based on RUST and Wasm, which will stepwise develop into an advanced smart contract language that makes it both simple and secure to apply MPC as efficiently as possible on Partisia Blockchain. Jesper is passionate about programming languages and compilers, and has previously created a high-level modelling language for real-time systems, a DSL for filters and queries in datasets, and most recently a C-compiler for the MOS6502 CPU.

Jesper comes from a position as Director at Rambøll Management and has been responsible for development, operations, sales and marketing of the leading SaaS products SurveyXact and Heart & Mind with thousands of customers and millions of users. Jesper is also an external examiner on Computer Science and Engineering examinations in Denmark.

May 2021

Private Decentralized IoT Storage

Partisia has been granted funding from the Danish Cyber Hub in collaboration with Chocolate Cloud and Aarhus University to explore decentralized privacy-preserving IoT storage and analytics. The project aims at combining Partisia’s PBC Platform for MPC based confidential data processing, and Chocolate Cloud’s distributed storage solution SkyFlok optimised for distributed storage and Linear Network Coding.

The project will be testing the complementary match of the two sets of technologies and explore business collaboration with a particular focus on IoT.

February 2021

Better Internet Search

Together with Scottish based Better Internet Search (BIS), Partisia has received a grant from the EU-funded Next Generation Internet Trust (NGI Trust) to further develop a privacy-preserving alternative to the mainstream search engine.

NGI Trust seeks to support the “development of a human-centric internet” and provides assistance for projects via the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program. The project aims at integrating BIS with Partisia Blockchain, which provide BIS with a decentralized infrastructure with built-in privacy-preserving computation capability. The grant supports the integration and test of tokenization. The project will also explore how MPC can personalize search and advertisement without compromising the users’ privacy and more.

The project also tests the latest version of Partisia Blockchain Testnet released the by the Partisia Blockchain Foundation.

December 2020

Partisia Blockchain Foundation

Partisia has co-founded the Partisia Blockchain Foundation created to launch a WEB 3.0 public blockchain built for trust, transparency, privacy and speed of light finalization. The first early contribution of USD 2,6 millions has secured the project a head start.

This project will turn the commercial grade PBC Platform into a global WEB 3.0 public blockchain. In September, the project received a non-rejection letter by FINMA the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority and the foundation was launched in October. The foundation setup is similar to other global open source blockchain projects like Ethereum and Cardano, and the Partisia Blockchain Foundation is supervised by Swiss regulators.

Partisia Blockchain is a unique combination of a high performance blockchain that functions as a bedrock for efficient, scalable and robust orchestration of MPC. This combination of blockchain and MPC technologies provide an optimal foundation for native privacy-preserving applications. A core part of the infrastructure is the MPC based Oracle utilizing the co-founder Sepior’s MPC based key management solution. In combination with staking, the MPC Oracle plays a key role in seamless transfer of crypto assets across blockchains. This enables the use of any liquid coin as means of payment on the Partisia Blockchain and as reward to node operators. It also plays a core role in value transfer across blockchains, which is initially tested by the co-founder Insights Network.

The Partisia Blockchain Foundation issues a MPC Token for staking and node operation only as the infrastructure is coin agnostic and driven by existing liquid coins.

October 2020

OSCAR

The Innovation Fund Denmark has granted DKK 24,5 millions to further develop the MPC based infrastructure for privacy-preserving use of public-private data initiated by the HedaX Project and establish a sustainable public-private partnership. The project is a Grand Solution named OSCAR (One Stop Shop for Clinical Research) and pivots around a study on precision medicine for cancer and clinical evidence.

The software development focuses on the so-called Virtual Public Register (VPR) platform that virtually combines registers using MPC, operated and governed by the public registers as data providers. OSCAR includes GDPR regulated data via the so-called Data for Good (DFG) Platform that allows citizens to activate GDPR regulated data governed by the not for profit Data for Good Foundation. The initial version of both VPR and DFG is under construction in the parallel Grand Solution HedaX.

Partisia Applications is responsible for the development of the VPR platform and the project brings together a long list of partners that are dedicated to realising the potential: Rigshospitalet, Amgros, A-evidence, Enversion, Datafair, DPOmanagement and Roche. The project is linked to both the BLOCKDAP project funded by the Danish Industry Foundation as well as HedaX funded by Innovation Fund Denmark with a total combined investment across the three projects is approx. DKK 110 millions.

April 2020

HedaX

The Innovation Fund Denmark has granted DKK 16 millions to bring an MPC based infrastructure for public-private data exchange to the market. The project is a Grand Solution named HedaX, and it focuses on health data and two distinct use cases within cancer and bipolar diseases. The public-private data exchange infrastructure consists of the DFG and the VPR platform. The Data for Good (DFG) Platform allows citizens to activate GDPR regulated data, governed by the not for profit Data for Good Foundation and MPC. The Virtual Public Register (VPR) Platform, virtually combine registers using MPC operated and governed by the public registers as data providers. The two platforms use advanced cryptography to open up for more use (not sharing) of data.
Partisia Applications is responsible for the software development in HedaX, and the project brings together a long list of partners that are dedicated to realising the potential:
Data Fair, Data for Good Foundation, The Alexandra Institute, Statistics Denmark, Monsenso, Kæftensbekæmpelse, Lundbeck, Aarhus Universitet, Region Hovedstaden and DPO Management.
The project is linked to the project “Blockchain Data and Privacy” funded by the Danish Industry Foundation and the total combined investment across the two projects is approx. DKK 30 millions.

November 2019

Cyberian is Live

Cyberian, a new institutional crypto off exchange liquidity venue, has launched the world’s first trustless venue for trading blocks of digital assets.
Partisia has collaborated with Tora about developing the matching market Cyberian since 2017. Jointly, the founders of Cyberian (Tora and Partisia) each have decades of experience developing trading technology and secure multiparty computing solutions.

November 2019

MPC Alliance is Live

As part of a global initiative, Partisia and Sepior are co-founders of the MPC Alliance. The goal is to unite developers and practitioners of Secure Multiparty Computation (MPC) to accelerate industry awareness and adoption of MPC. The MPC Alliance consists of industry leaders and pioneers within the development and commercial adoption of MPC.

Partisia pioneered commercial use of MPC in 2008 by offering decentralized auction solutions. The next class of commercial solutions was key management as offered by Sepior and Unbound. Today, the maturity of MPC makes it suitable for collaborative solutions in a broad sense and across industries from finance to healthcare.

September 2019

Bosch

Secata has signed an agreement with BOSCH about developing industrial-grade secure multiparty computation protocols. Privacy-preserving data analysis within IoT and not least the automobile industry is instrumental for sustainable growth. This project aiming at bringing secure multiparty computation into the center of this challenge.

September 2019

PBC is Live

The first production ready version of the Privacy Blockchain infrastructure (PBC) has been finalised and is ready for private deployment. In close collaboration with the first integration customers and projects, PBC applications within market design and data analytics are under construction.

August 2019

Blockchain Data and Privacy

Partisia Applications is one of the partners behind the project “Blockchain Data and Privacy” funded by the Danish Industry Foundation with approx. 5 million DKK. The project will show how a combination of so-called zero-knowledge technologies (such as secure multiparty computation) and traditional blockchain technologies provide a better platform for transparent and yet privacy-preserving use of confidential data. The project pivots around a generic infrastructure for public-private data exchange to be built on top of privacyblockchain.io and two use cases within healthcare and telemedicine. Secata works closely together with Data Fair, the Alexandra Institute and the Data for Good Foundation about developing a fully compliant public-private infrastructure for citizen-centric data exchange.

August 2019

Fraud Detection

Partisia participated in an event hosted by the Financial Conduct Authority in the UK that brought together banks, regulators and experts in privacy-preserving technologies to explore new ways to fight financial crime. In collaboration with Sedicii, Goldman Sachs, Deloitte and Ex Ante Advisory, Partisia has developed a concept and demonstration software that shows how secure multiparty computation can address financial fraud: From confidential pre-transaction analysis between the sender and the receiver, to close collaboration with regulators and financial investigators around detecting complex fraud patterns. The demonstrator utilizes the privacyblockchain.io infrastructure to ensure confidential and yet transparent and traceable fraud detection.

February 2019

Semper Arden Center

Partisia partners play a key role in the Semper Ardens Center – Blockchain and Electronic Markets – financed by the Carlsberg Foundation with DKK 17,2 millions (3,5 years). The center will explore the foundation of a decentralized WEB 3.0 and its use in electronic markets. Using the tools of economics, game theory and cryptography, the center will explore the interplay between public ledger; smart contracts; decentralized applications; and privacy measures by zero-knowledge computation like secure multiparty computation. The center facilitates and extends a close collaboration between Economists at University of Copenhagen and Computer Scientists at Aarhus University.

February 2019

Concordium Center

Partisia partners play a key role in the Concordium Blockchain Research Centre Aarhus financed by the Concordium foundation with DKK 50 millions (5 years). The driving goal of the research center is to provide the basic research needed to build energy-efficient and scalable blockchain technology that is provably secure, including zero-knowledge techniques. The center facilitates a close collaboration between e.g. cryptography and programming languages and will strengthen Aarhus University’s strategic focus on digitalisation.

December 2018

Big Data by Security

As part of the R&D project Big Data by Security, Partisia has been a key initiator behind a unique sandbox project for public-private data collaboration. Secure Multiparty Computation is used to create a virtual platform between public registers, which allows users to run approved encrypted computation on the virtually combined data. The sandbox project involves the two independent public registers Statistics Denmark and the Danish Healthcare Data. The initial implementation ends the R&D project and the sandbox project continues in close collaboration with experts in healthcare analytics.

December 2018

Insight Network Complete

The first complete version of the unique infrastructure behind the blockchain based data broker – Insights Network – has been deployed. The combination of blockchain and Secure Multiparty Computation replaces the traditional data broker and bring data under the control of the users. The Secata team has worked closely together with Insights.network throughout 2018, and the recently deployed version releases the solution described in the white paper behind the project. With the basic infrastructure in place, the Insights Network project is ready to fully realise the power of a decentralised data broker service. Secata will continue optimizing the solution in collaboration with Insights.network.

October 2018

VCTRADE in Japan

Sepior and SBI Group announce joint development of a secure online wallet for Japan’s first bank-backed, government-licensed cryptocurrency exchange – VCTRADE.

May 2018

Caspian Advisor

Ivan Damgård and Partisia has signed an advisory agreement with Caspian Tech – a full-stack crypto trading and risk management platform for institutional investors and sophisticated traders. Caspian Tech brings tools for professional trading to crypto assets, hereby reducing the barriers for institutional investors to invest broadly in crypto assets.

April 2018

Secata established

Based on years of R&D and customer needs, Partisia has established the spinout Secata focusing on privacy-preserving statistics. A prime focus is to offer end-to-end secure data solutions that allow individual persons or companies to control their own data. Secata achieves this through Secure Multiparty Computation and other privacy-enhancing technologies to reach the highest level of data protection without hampering usability. A prime example is Insights Network, a blockchain based data exchange that allows data subject to control their own data and profit from sharing their data. Secata provides the core infrastructure that guarantees transparency by use of Blockchain and privacy by use of Secure Multiparty Computation.

Marts 2018

SBI Invest in Sepior

The Japanese financial services giant SBI Holdings with 23.5 million customers including 4.3 million brokerage accounts, has invested in Sepior (a Partisia Spinout) and has agreed to license Sepior’s threshold security solutions for use in their government-approved Virtual Currencies trading platform, to be the world’s first and largest bank-backed cryptocurrency exchange. SBI Holdings is one of the top corporate investors in blockchain companies including Ripple and R3.

January 2018

Prestigious award

Professor Ivan Damgård, Chief cryptographer and Partner in Partisia, has been awarded the prestigious Villum Kann Rasmussen Annual Award as one of the world’s leading and most influential researchers in his field: computer science, cryptography and data security. In particular, the committee acknowledges Ivan Damgård’s work on Secure Multiparty Computation, from the initial theoretical proofs in the 1980s to his contribution to commercial use today through Partisia and Sepior. The commercial use was initiated by the Partisia founders with the first large-scale use of MPC in 2008. Since then, a tremendous collective international collaboration and competition has matured the technology and paved the way for MPC as a component in modern decentralized secure information systems. The award is the largest individual Danish research award given to a Danish researcher in recognition of a particularly valuable contribution to the technical and natural sciences.

December 2017:

Partisia has entered a collaboration with Insights Network on constructing a decentralized data broker that empowers the data subjects as data providers. A unique infrastructure with no single point of trust provides transparency by use of Blockchain and privacy by use of Secure Multiparty Computation (MPC). Partisia has designed new MPC protocols that meet the requirements for the decentralized peer-2-peer infrastructure.

Insights Network challenges existing data brokers by allowing the individual data subjects to control and to capitalize on their own data. The combined use of blockchain and MPC ensure that the bilateral exchange of data happens frictionless and without involving anyone but the data requester and the data providers. Also, the exchange of data and payment is controlled by neither the requester nor the provider and is enforceable without any third party involvement.

The project has received the basic seed funding and a public crowdsale is scheduled to start late January 2018. For more see >>

September 2017:

As part of the project “Big Data by Security” a statistical application based on MPC has been developed and deployed within Statistics Denmark. The purpose is to investigate how MPC can increase the use of sensitive data from Statistics Denmark without compromising confidentiality.

This work has a direct link to the final report from Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking in the US. This report explores how to increase the availability of data for assessing government programs without compromising privacy and confidentiality. The report explains how MPC can be part of the solution as currently tested with Statistics Denmark.

August 2017:

Partisia has entered a collaboration with Tora on developing MPC software for Tora’s applications for the financial markets. Tora is the provider of the industry’s most advanced cloud-based order and execution platform (OEMS) and operator of Crosspoint, a Hong Kong licensed ATS. Every day over three billion dollars of institutional volume is traded through the Tora platform.

The collaboration focuses first on applying MPC as the basic computation engine in the Crosspoint matching service to avoid any data leakages or misuse of information on financial exchanges. This is a regulated part of the financial markets and MPC addresses unintended misuse of data. Partisia is developing a new protocol called MACE (Multiparty Agile Computation Engine) that meets the very high security, performance and flexibility requirements needed.

December 2016:

Peter F Frandsen joins Partisia as Technical Director focusing on confidential statistics based on Secure Multiparty Computation. Peter comes from a position as Manager in Rambøll Management Consulting and has extensive experience within all aspects of selling, designing, developing and operating large-scale professional systems used in survey system and advanced, integrated data collection and reporting. Peter holds a Master degree in Computer Science from Aarhus University and has served an external examiner herein including Software development and architecture, databases as well as theoretical topics since 2007.

In parallel, Emil Bremer Orloff joins Partisia as software developer. Emil also holds a Master degree in Computer Science from Aarhus University and has experience in software development from Trifork and prior to that Rambøll Management Consulting.

April 2016:

Ahmet Tuncay replaces Nicolaj Højer as CEO in Sepior (Nicolaj continues in Sepior as non-executive member of the board). Ahmet is located in California and was CEO of Soonr a Danish and US-based it-company and a secure content management SaaS provider to over 150,000 businesses that were acquired by Autotask. Before Soonr, Ahmet held executive roles at SpiderCloud and Trapeze Networks, an enterprise wireless company acquired by Juniper. Ahmet was the founding CEO of SolarFlare, a fabless semiconductor company, and held management and engineering roles at PairGain Technologies, SynOptics Communications, and Electronic Data Systems.

December 2015:

Partisia’s High Stake Auction tailored for the Norwegian 1800 MHz Spectrum Auction, has been used to trade spectrum rights for a total of NOK 877.983.276 over the course of 7 days and 83 bidding rounds. The auction has been designed, developed and operated in collaboration with Copenhagen Economics since June 2014.

More about the result of the auction >>

November 2015:

Sepior has been granted a SME Instrument Phase 2 grant of 2.3 million EURO under the H2020 program with Partisia as co-beneficiary. Sepior is the main partner and the entire project focuses entirely on turning Sepior and the product Sepior Key Management into a scalable and profitable business.

October 2015:

Partisia is one of the partners behind the new project “Big Data by Security” funded by the Danish Industry Foundation with approx. 7,6 million DDK. The project will illustrate how Secure Multiparty Computation can become an infrastructure for sensitive data in a Big Data context. The project focuses on two cases: One on credit rating and one on accessing sensitive data from Danish Statistics in an all-new way.
Read more about the project (in Danish) >>

September 2015:

Energiauktion.dk hosted the 21th energy conference on liberalising the energy market “Det Frie Energimarked 2015” (in Danish).
Read more about the conference (in Danish) >>

April 2015:

Together with Cybernetica (a R&D ICT company), Partisia has developed a secure survey system within the EU project PRACTICE. The secure multiparty computation based survey system ensures that the submitted answers are kept encrypted at all time. Also, the software architecture has been designed for allowing the very same web service (the survey) to run on two different systems to secure multiparty computation. The first real-life survey has been conducted.
Read more about the survey system >>Read more about PRACTICE >>

April 2015:

Chief cryptographer and Partner in Partisia, Ivan Damgård, has been awarded the RSA award “Excellence in the Field of Mathematics” for his work on cryptographic hash functions and Secure Multiparty Computation.
Read more about the reward >>

July 2014:

New director at Energiauktion.dk. Kenneth Lykkedal is now commercial director at Energiauktion.dk. Kenneth has been working in the energy sector since 1996 among other places at Bergen Energy, Dong Energy and Nord Pool Spot. Kenneth joins the Energiauktion.dk team with a primary focus on sale and business development.

June 2014:

Partisia has been awarded the job of developing, implementing and operating the 1800 MHz spectrum auction in Norway by the Norwegian Post and Telecommunication Authority (www.npt.no). The job will be carried out in cooperation with Copenhagen Economics.

Marts 2014:

Energiauktion.dk is now adjusted to utilize the newly opened Datahub. By Marts 2014 the Danish datahub that works as a single access point to consumption data on all Danish electricity meters, contains the required 12 months of historical data. Energiauktion.dk has been adjusted to utilize the Datahub to simplify the way procurement auctions are conducted and hereby enhance competition on electricity.

August 2013:

Together with the former CEO at codesealer Nicolaj Højer Nielsen, Partisia raises 4.2 million DKK from SEED Capital, DTU Symbion and private business angels to a new cloud security company. The new company focus on creating and managing strong cryptographic keys in the cloud – a solution that neither relies on trust in any third party nor on-premise encryption gateways.

Juli 2013:

Partisia has been granted 2 million DKK as part of the EU FP7 project PRACTICE. PRACTICE is a large-scale European R&D project that brings together 17 universities and it-companies around Privacy-Preserving Computation in the Cloud. Partisia will focus on collaborative systems based on Secure Multiparty Computation such as auctions and benchmarking systems. The Project starts in November 2013 and will run for 3 years.

November 2012:

Partisia has developed and operated the Norwegian 2 GHz spectrum auction for the Norwegian Postal and Telecommunications authority (www.npt.no). The auction was held on 19 November and the design, development and operation have been don