Threshold Network and the Wonderful World of Threshold Cryptography - MacLane Wilkison

uh it's great to be back here for we're sponsoring for the fifth year for east denver since the og east denver um some of you who are ogs in the conference may be hearing me say that and also looking at the slides and thinking threshold and having no idea who i am but maybe you've heard of us under a different name so over the past year or so the new cypher and keep communities have been heads down busy designing implementing and as of january 1st of this year executing the first ever decentralized network merger so by the way if any of you out in the audience have new or keep tokens you can upgrade those to t if you see in the bottom left you can just go to the threshold dashboard and do that and that will allow you to participate in the network and do all the things that our you know people want to do on threshold which is stake and run nodes lp participate in governance and basically just get engaged with the threshold community so that's who we are um but what are we so threshold is a network for maybe maybe obviously threshold cryptography um and threshold provides a set of interfaces and runtimes for different threshold cryptography services and if that sounds like a bunch of techno mumbo jumbo uh i'm here to help so some of you that might have clicked right away if you are a cryptography engineer or if you're a low-level infrastructure developer but for the rest of us a short primer on threshold crypto threshold cryptography allows you to protect information by distributing cryptographic operations across multiple independent parties or nodes and it requires some threshold number of those nodes to come together and cooperate in order to actually execute some cryptographic operation so if you have a cryptographic primitive you know let's call it a cryptographic signature encryption decryption operations uh for the most part you can probably create some sort of threshold variant of that primitive that's not universally true for for all crypto primitives but for a lot of them it is and that's what a threshold network is doing uh so that's the what and then the why so why should you as a as a developer or an application builder or user even care about threshold cryptography and not just use you know our tried and true standard cryptographic primitives the benefits of splitting a cryptographic operation across multiple nodes is that you can increase security because you're not reliant on any single central operator to basically execute this operation you also get some availability benefits so if you have a threshold of a bunch of nodes and a few of them go offline as long as you still have a quorum of those nodes standing by and ready to sort of meet their meet their service guarantees you know whatever operation you're wanting to do will still work and it also of course dovetails very nicely with all the things that we care about uh in blockchain which is reducing trust assumptions um so i think threshold crypto and blockchains are sort of two p's in a pod from from that perspective and allows us to really uh take a lot of the censorship resistance benefits that we get from from blockchain and take those up uh even another level uh so just some some examples of threshold uh cryptographic primitives uh encryption decryption you know you can have like a shmear secret sharing scheme where you require uh some quorum of of key holders or share key shareholders to come together in order to decrypt some message you can do something very similar with signatures where instead of having you know one signer that holds the private key you can you have basically a set of signers and that key is private key materials basically shared across all of them and some quora need to come together in order to produce a valid signature so that's all all great but like what can you as a developer actually do using threshold with all this fancy threshold cryptography and a lot of things so decentralized access controls is a super interesting one so if you're building some kind of application and your users are storing private data that they might not want to expose to you know everyone that has access to uh everyone in the world or on the public network uh you can you have basically two choices you can either use a centralized single server to sort of gate access and decide who can and can't access that data or you can use threshold and specifically proxy re-encryption to implement those access controls in a decentralized and transparent way you can also do very interesting things like conditional encryption or decryption so you only want people to be able to access data if certain conditions are met say like a payment or you know within some time box we're actually running a joint bounty with our friends at tallywallet to create a social recovery mechanism so if you're interested in hacking on something and on threshold network and with threshold crypto i think that's an opportunity to build something super cool uh this weekend and then the other major use case uh that we're focused on at threshold network for threshold crypto is using distributed key generation and threshold signatures to construct truly decentralized cross-chain bridges and specifically uh we built a product called tbtc uh the second version of which we'll run on on the threshold network and i'll talk about that in more depth in a few minutes so hopefully you have like this enlightenment moment now of like okay it all makes sense uh threshold network basically provides a suite of all these different threshold cryptography services and exposes those effectively as an api to you as a developer and so the reason why you might want to use threshold network to consume those services is because we basically make it super easy you don't have to worry about rolling your own crypto which is super difficult and needs to go through multiple audits to get something that's you're comfortable with we've implemented that cryptography for you you don't have to worry about figuring out who's actually going to run those threshold cryptography operations that you want to do within your application or within your protocol threshold network has a network of several thousand nodes that are basically struck constructed and designed specifically to do this and that are standing by to accept whatever threshold you know cryptographic policies you want to send to the network and execute those on your behalf and then you don't also you also don't have to worry about all these sort of game theory and cryptoeconomics and making sure that these nodes are properly incentivized uh to behave correctly we've figured that out for you already with threshold so i think the best way to think of threshold is this if you have a use case for threshold crypto think of threshold almost like as an api um for you to easily consume that uh and then some some of these specific threshold primitives that are running on the network today we have proxy re-encryption and pre is great for this access control use case so if you want to grant and revoke access to data and condition access on let's say a payment so if you're building a decentralized spotify or some sort of decentralized streaming service you can allow content creators to stream some content that's encrypted and only grant access to people if they pay for a stream or they subscribe for example you can time gate so you can prohibit people from accessing before some you know before some day time or or revoke access after some date time you can even do basically any kind of arbitrary condition either on chain or off chain if you're comfortable basically trusting oracle's to do that and then we're also about to ship i guess like essentially a v2 of proxy re-encryption which makes it much much more easier to use proxy re-encryption on threshold than it previously was on new cypher and specifically some of the things that are coming with those updates are scaling so you'll be able to grant and revoke uh access on polygon and other l2s pretty soon here in the future we've also been hard at work building out cross-platform support so you can use this super easily from you know a mobile mobile device or a web browser and just to give a shout out to a couple of the projects that are actually building on proxy re-encryption i think specifically this one here at the bottom master masterfile actually started at east denver hackathon last year and now they're a well-funded venture-backed project that's basically using proxy re-encryption to create a decentralized open drm standard so giving brands and companies a way to sort of put their ip out into the nft in web3 space while sort of retaining uh some degree of control over that and hopefully onboarding a bunch more sort of legacy companies and brands into the space the other major application right now that we'll be launching on on threshold pretty soon is the version 2 of tbtc and some of you might be familiar with tbtc already but it is the only decentralized permissionless bitcoin bridge so if you're familiar with wrapped bitcoin you basically send your bitcoin to bitco or some centralized custodian they hold on to it for you and they issue you a tokenized representation of that bitcoin on the ethereum network and you can take that and you can use it as collateral to do d5 stuff you know yield farm uh borrow lend whatever you want to do within the ethereum ecosystem tbtc is basically offering that very similar use case we're safely bringing defy or safely bringing bitcoin to d5 except it replaces that centralized custodian with a fully decentralized network of signers so it's basically collectively secured by the thousands of threshold nodes that are acting as signers within the threshold network and v2 of tbtc basically completely solves the the main roadblock for v1 which was the economic scalability if you were acting as a signer in tbtc v1 you had to over collateralize uh your signer node and essentially that made it very expensive to to run a threshold a tbtc to v1 node and essentially limited the minting capacity but v2 basically completely solves that problem without compromising the security and decentralization uh which tbtc is sort of the whole reason for being and essentially with tbtc v2 there is now there won't be any practical cap on its minting capacity um unless you're pedantic and you say 21 million is the is the cap because that's how many bitcoin there are um but i do want to make it clear like tbtc is not just a bridge so what we've done is we've separated the custody piece and the minting piece which means it's going to be very easy in the future for for users to mint tbt not just on ethereum l1 but other l2s other smart contract platforms where there's the default ecosystem that has demand for bitcoin uh you can even bridge bitcoin to d5 without generating a token at all and that could be used as collateral for example to take out a loan and another uh very interesting project that product is being built on top of tbtc b2 is uh threshold usd which is a decentralized bitcoin backed stablecoin and basically this will allow bitcoin holders to bridge their bitcoin via tbtc take out a loan that's collateralized by that bitcoin and that threshold usd is essentially an over collateralized uh dollar pegged stable coin that you can then take and use to yield farm or do whatever you like within the d5 ecosystem or even swap into usdc and cash out into fiat dollars so if you're interested in building things like that on top of tbtc uh pre any other threshold cryptography we're super keen to talk to you and definitely drop by our booth on the second floor and by the way all this is a dow so threshold is community owned and operated it has of course like the original two dev teams by way of new cypher and keep but there's also a very robust and thriving community so there's already a marketing guild there's an integrations guild which is very actively going out and building partnerships with other projects in the d5 space for tbtc uh threshold dow has a treasury that's over 100 million dollars and there's a treasury guild that's very actively deploying that capital to help scale threshold and to help scale tbtc and so we need all sorts of talent for the dao if you're interested in any of those guilds or any other potential future guilds definitely join our discord and there's great opportunities for you to contribute regardless of your skill set you know the dow is is scaling quickly and it needs a lot of talent that's it for me thank you so much for the opportunity to share a little bit about threshold this was effectively our our coming out party as a combined network from new cipher and keep at least in real life um so we're super excited to talk to you all over the weekend and here's a bunch of resources um definitely join the discord if you're interested that's where the dow works day to day that's where all the guilds hang out that's where we develop and build our products and again if you have new or keep tokens you can head to the staking dashboard and you can upgrade those to tokens and join join the community thanks so much