What is MPC technology?

Multi-party computation or MPC or privacy-preserving computation was invented nearly 40 years ago by Chinese computer scientist Andrew Yao. It has been in development for several decades and has only recently entered the digital asset space.

It has evolved from an intellectual curiosity to one of the primary technologies used to secure crypto assets by wallet providers and custodians. It is safe to say it has rapidly gained acceptance as the next generation of private key security.

Multi-party computation, in short and in crypto, is a keyless transaction signing method that replaces the private key with key shares generated independently by multiple non-trusting parties without sharing any data. This means that at any given time, no single party has access to or visibility of the entire key.

Other than cryptocurrency, multi-party computation technology can be applied to other real-world scenarios, such as data analytics and sensitive research involving confidential user data.

As demonstrated in the widely cited video by Boston University, competitive organizations can use MPC technology to collaborate on issues of collective good—without having to share their confidential user data: