By
Steve Muchoki
April 19th, 2024
EMURGO Ventures, the primary investment vehicle of the Cardano ecosystem, said today it is partnering with the Partisia Blockchain project to get more privacy tools in the hands of developers building decentralized applications on the Cardano blockchain.
Partisia is one of the most exciting projects in the Cardano ecosystem, building a completely decentralized Web3 infrastructure that will ensure users retain greater control over their data. It’s focused on privacy, using multi-party computation to enable data to be processed on the blockchain without anyone needing to read the underlying information. This is enabled through a technique known as zero-knowledge proofs, and gives users a way to interact with blockchain services completely anonymously.
In other words, dApps that use Partisia’s protocol will be able to obscure transactions completely, hiding the amounts sent and the wallet addresses involved, giving full privacy to their users.
EMURGO Ventures was established by its parent firm EMURGO Ptd. Ltd. last year as part of a $100 million investment vehicle that aims to support the development of dApps and middleware solutions being built on Cardano. EMURGO Ptd. Ltd. is one of the founding entities and the commercial arm of Cardano.
Under the partnership, Partisia’s developers will be commissioned to develop customized smart contacts for Cardano dApp developer’s specific use cases. It means Cardano developers have more options with regard to building privacy and anonymity into their dApps.
“This partnership serves to add more elements to [the developer’s] toolbox to provide services that users will demand such as privacy features,” said EMURGO founder and Chief Executive Ken Kodama.
It’s big news for Cardano developers because privacy-preserving zero-knowledge proofs and blockchains are seen as key building blocks of the future Web3, which refers to a futuristic, decentralized internet infrastructure where users have full control over their own data.
The importance of privacy in Web3 was recently highlighted by the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, one of the highest-profile investors in the crypto and blockchain space.
“The next phase, this next decade, will be about the ability to interact with anyone, anywhere and at any time, privately, without revealing one’s data and with more control in the user’s hands,” a16z wrote in a recent blog post. “Zero-knowledge proofs will need to continue improving performance in order to support large-scale applications. And blockchains will need to use zero-knowledge proofs in order to scale and achieve real-world adoption.”
Partisia is at the forefront of the crypto industry’s push to bring zero-knowledge proofs into the mainstream, with the first full version of its smart contract programming language for ZK-proofs and MPC computations set to be released this summer.
Partisia co-founder Brian Gallagher said the partnership with EMURGO Ventures will be its first opportunity to deliver cross-chain zero-knowledge privacy smart contracts to Cardano developers.
“We built Partisia Blockchain with a collaborative approach to make our privacy contracts available across all other networks and this partnership is a strong indication that we’re finding product market fit in this industry and that privacy is in demand,” Gallager added.