2024-02-07

Where

https://zoom.us/my/hyperledger.community.backup?pwd=dkJKdHRlc3dNZEdKR1JYdW40R2pDUT09=

Content:

The FMSIG's second presentation of the year relates to Digital Assets, specifically Financial Market Instruments such as Equities, Bonds and their Derivatives. They are also called security tokens, also Real World Assets (RWA).

For digital assets are to be hosted on shared infrastructure such as a Blockchain, parallel Financial market Infrastructure and payment rails need confidentiality guarantees. Mani Pillai, CEO of otcDigital has been working on this problem for a number of years. Instead of starting from scratch, he has been upgrading the platform he built and deployed. He has been collaborating with Polymesh. Thus Mani's experience in what worked in TradFi has been a great asset in the new world of Digital Assets.

Although zero knowledge proofs have been in the news lately, the layering and loose coupling of such tools are extremely important for scalability. ZK Rollups and such technology are not fit for purpose for the scale and reach of Financial Market Infrastructure. 

Mani is a doer. An hour is not enough to do a demo of what he is working on. Mani will sketch the architecture and the solution and provide a rationale for the way this works. We will engage with him for a longer meeting later in the year for a comprehensive demo.

The otcDigital solution is focused on standards like CDM (with built-in cryptographic integrity and lifecycle event operations and tracking) and takes forward the dual DLT architecture that we had proposed for CBDCs a couple of years ago and implemented partly in the eThaler lab.

Please join us to ask questions and provide comments

Announcement

Presentation

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Questions that were answered (listen to the recording to get a sense of the answers):

Chat: Edited for brevity by VB

Jim Zhang : Is this based on Zether (seems so far it shares a lot of common cryptographic primitives)?
Answer: Robert Gabriel Jakabosky : The confidential assets is based on the MERCAT whitepaper: https://assets.polymesh.network/MERCAT.pdf.  It does use the same homomorphic encryption as Zether uses.

Robert Gabriel Jakabosky : Polymesh has some features that Zether doesn't have.   Like receiver affirmations (no airdrops), auditors, mediators.  Also we have atomic settlements (multiple assets transfers in a single atomic transaction).

Nick : Hi Folks - just to clarify the features we are discussing here are not currently on Polymesh Mainnet.  We will be making some announcements soon on how to gain access to confidential assets.  If you would like to know more please reach out to @William Vaz Jones (will@polymesh.network) or myself (nick@polymesh.network) after the call.

Daniel Szego : Thanks for the great presentation, perhaps a little bit tricky question, as there are many crypto primitives in the system. How much of the system is designed with cryptographic agility in mind ?  How easy is to migrate the core cryptographic primitives to another version if they turned out to be insecure, or to a post-quantum version if quantum threat turned out to be real ?

Robert Gabriel Jakabosky : Polymesh uses the Substrate framework, which make it easy to do forkless network updates.  For the zk-proofs it would be possible to add a new version and allow users to migrate to the new zk-proof.
Robert Gabriel Jakabosky : For encrypted balances (Elgamal encryptions), migrating those balances to some new encryption algo. would require some zk-proof to migrate balances. 

Amirreza Sarencheh : We do have standard post-quantum cryptographic primitives that can be used as alternatives (at the cost of efficiency).

Recording

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