ARPA x Binance AMA Recap

22h ngày 04/111/19, dự án #ARPA đã tổ chức buổi AMA trên nhóm telegram Binance English. Dưới đây là văn bản ghi lại nội dung chính của buổi AMA.

AMA chia làm 3 phần như thường khi:

Recap AMA BlockchainCrews with FORE PROTOCOL April 5, 2023

6 Tháng Tư, 2023

Sàn giao dịch tiền điện tử xã hội MoonXBT nhận được sự hỗ trợ từ các nhà giao dịch

4 Tháng Tư, 2022

Phần 1: Richie sẽ hỏi Yemu 5 câu hỏi về dự án ARPA

Phần 2: Yemu sẽ đặt 5 câu hỏi và đường link tới google form để mọi người điền câu trả lời và thông tin nhận thưởng. Tổng thưởng là 493,500 $ARPA

Phần 3: Cộng đồng sẽ đặt câu hỏi gửi tới Yemu , 10 câu hỏi hay nhất sẽ nhận mỗi người 1,650 $ARPA

Nội dung chi tiết:

GIỚI THIỆU VỀ YEMU & ARPA

My name is Yemu Xu and I am the cofounder & CGO at ARPA. At ARPA I’m in charge of the overall BD, PR, marketing and growth. Prior to cofounding ARPA I was the Head of Growth at Boro, a Money 20/20 fintech startup that raised over $10mil. Before that, I worked as an actuarial consultant at Fidelity Investments in Chicago. I am also a entrepreneur-in-residence at ZhenFund, one of China’s most prominent VCs.

I am Felix Xu, Cofounder & CEO of ARPA.I graduated with Finance, Information Systems majors @ New York University, a college known for its CS and AI research. For the past 6 years I have been working on venture capital investment in Fintech, big data and AI startups. Most recently I led blockchain sector research and early stage investment at Fosun Group, one of the largest conglomerates in China. To give some examples I invested Suishou Technology, Datebao Insurance, Huike Group in China and MakeMyTrip (NYSE: MMYT) in India.

I came into blockchain space since 2016 working with enterprise blockchains (non-crypto) and bought my 1st bitcoin in mid 2017. Still Hodl the same bitcoin. At ARPA, we also helps China for setting national standard on multiparty computation, a core tech of ARPA.

A brief intro about ARPA – Intro Video:

ARPA is a blockchain-based layer 2 solution for privacy-preserving computation, enabled by cryptographic Multi-Party Computation (“MPC”). Founded in April 2018, the goal of ARPA is to separate data utility from ownership, and enable data renting. ARPA’s MPC protocol creates ways for multiple entities to collaboratively analyze data and extract data synergies, while keeping each party’s data input private and secure. ARPA allows secret sharing of private data, and the correctness of computation is verifiable using information-theoretic Message Authentication Code (MAC).

Developers can build privacy-preserving dApps on blockchains compatible with ARPA. Some immediate use cases include: credit anti-fraud, secure data wallet, precision marketing, joint AI model training, key management systems, etc. For example, banks using the ARPA network can share their credit blacklist with each other for risk management purposes without exposing their customer data or inquiry.

Phần 1: Richie sẽ hỏi Yemu 5 câu hỏi về dự án ARPA

Câu 1: It’s really a great honor to have you here with us to explain and educate the community of your project and products. To begin, can you please explain on what ARPA is and its purpose?

Trả lời:

As we all know the world is running on data. Total amount of data currently is 18ZB, growing at 50% annually. The total data value is estimated to be 14 trillion USD per year. Data has become the most valuable asset class that everyone is generating on a daily basis. Centralized data collection causes abuse and leads to privacy problem.

Our vision is to return data right to the people and disrupt the current way of centralized data sharing. In late 2017, we identified problems in data sharing while I was working on Fintech investment at Fosun Group. The traditional way of data sharing is to find a trusted third party to collect data from all participants.

As individuals, we can’t collect reward for data generated. As companies, all companies are trying to build models or analysis on siloed data without sharing with each other. We built ARPA to solve this proble.

To solve this problem, we founded ARPA in early 2018, dedicated to privacy-preserving data sharing research, especially multiparty computation, a cryptographic technique to process computation on encrypted data. Our solution doesn’t introduce any third party, and clears the blocker that participants concerned about the third party stealing their precious data. MPC is a cutting-edge technology and we are among the very few pioneers that working on commercializing the technology.

A brief explanation on multiparty computation (MPC) which is our core tech. Secure multiparty computation (MPC) is a set of cryptography technologies with the goal of creating methods for parties to jointly compute a function over their inputs while keeping those inputs private.

Informally, MPC enables multiple trustless parties A, B, C, … to jointly compute a function with the participants’ secret value without learning more information than what the result reveals.

A classical example of 2-party computation is the Millionaires’ Problem: two millionaires want to know who is richer with the absence of a trusted third party, in such a way that neither of them learns the net worth of the other. More generally, MPC allows n party (n >= 2) to jointly compute some information while preserving privacy for secret data.

In short, we are building a privacy preserving way for secure data sharing, or data renting -> to both utilize data and protect raw data privacy.

Câu 2: ARPA looks like a very international project. Can you give us an overview of ARPA’s team, what are the future development plans?

Trả lời:

Team is the single most important asset that any startup/tech companies can have, and ARPA is no exception. We are very fortunate to work with a group of talented entrepreneurs who lived, studied and worked internationally — this is in our gene and is what we believe essential to a project’s success.

Funny story when we formed core team –

I was an investor at Fosun covering Fintech space, and the most valuable asset for any company that Fosun loves to invest, is data.

This trend was true a couple years in the past but as companies (financial institutions) realize how valuable their data is, they stop sharing with fintech companies (data aggregator). But data can only be fully utilized when combined. So in November 2017 I start to brainstorm a new way for data sharing.

Alex, Derek and Jiang brianstormed with me as we were old time friends that have known each other for 4 years. We had weekly meetings on Saturday and that was the best time of my life. Very excited and hopeful.

All of us shared this vision of building a new paradigm, a privacy-preserving way for people and companies to share data. We actively reached out to EVERYONE in our network and found more people to join us.

In late March 2018, I quit from Fosun. Our cofounder Derek has several years of experience in AI, and Alex who earned a PhD in Cryptography from Tsinghua University (best in China) offered several route for privacy-preserving computation technology. Alex’s PhD research was in MPC and FHE algorithms. Yemu onboard in charge of user growth and BD, and Jiang joined from Google Cloud.

Since ARPA’s inception in late March, crypto market was not good and headed into crypto winter in 2nd half. But we had 0 turnover rate for core team which is unseen of in any startup.

Thats pretty much all for the team. We are also supported by top-notch researchers, research fellows under renowned professors like Ivan Damgard and Nigel Smart. And advisors with mixed background in tech, media, and business.

Currently we have 10 full time folks and several researchers and advisors. Now development plan –

ARPA’s Development is three-folds. Tech development, business development, and community development.

On the tech side, ARPA’s privacy-preserving computation network testnet went live on Feb 27th, 2019. We plan to launch our mainnet by the end of this year. In public blockchain space, ARPA testnet is built on top of Ethereum and we will support more blockchains in the future.

Since the inception of ARPA, we have been relentlessly delivering secure computation solution to some of the largest companies in the world, including JD.com, Sinochem and Fosun Group. We work along with Alibaba, Baidu, Ant Financial to assist the China Academy of Information and Communication Technology (CAICT) to set the national standard of MPC.

Recently China’s President Xi publicly expressed support for blockchain industry. We also in the process of joining IEEE work group for multiparty computation and federated learning.

For crypto community development. After one and half year’s progress and growth, ARPA now as a huge and lively community with more than 70,000 supporters speaking 8 different languages including Indian, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Filipino, Thai, Russian, Indonesian, among many others. yesterday we added Turkish language group.

Câu 3: Who are your competitors and how do you compare with them?

Trả lời:

Secure data sharing is huge, potentially trillion dollar market size and currently the penetration is nearly 0. Legislations are kicking in from EU, US and China etc. So there can be quite some projects that have meaningful market cap.

Some projects try to build data exchange or marketplace and use blockchain to track data flow. However this doesn’t really solve data leakage problem as once I can see the raw data, I can copy and share it elsewhere. Therefore only privacy-preserving computation can ensure the separation of data ownership and data utility.

Currently there is not many players in the privacy-preserving computation field. The current competitors include PlatOn, GXC, Enigma, Oasis labs. Platon currently focuses on threshold signature for distributed key management, but ARPA focuses more on data sharing for enterprise (later to individuals). So the target area is different.

GXC, Enigma and Oasis labs are using solutions based on secure hardware (TEE). However, the problems in TEE based solutions are 1) the trust is delegated to the hardware providers, meaning one has to trust Intel, AMD or ARM etc., 2) TEE has been reported to have security holes, for example in August 2018, 3) the correctness of computation is not verifiable.

We believe in terms of decentralization and efficiency, MPC is the best solution for privacy-preserving data infrastructure.

Think of blockchain as a set of trustless nodes together to maintain a ledger. MPC is a set of trustless nodes together to analyze on private data. Both MPC and blockchain are decentralized.

Câu 4: Recently, China’s president Xi Jinping made an official announcement and made blockchain a national strategy, how will this affect the blockchain/crypto industry and more importantly, APRA?

I think supporting the blockchain industry is a important step for Chinese Yuan international expansion. Blockchain and digital currency (not normal crypto) is part of finance infrastructure.

China has been researching on cryptocurrency and digitizing RMB as early as 2013. On October 24th China’s president Xi has announced a national-level, unprecedented support for blockchain technology and has set this as a national strategy. Crypto- and blockchain-related enterprises in China have finally got their time.

For APRA this is a historical opportunity – as we help build MPC national standard with respected research institution and large companies such as CAICT, Baidu and Alibaba, we have the credibility to knock on gov door for future funding, projects etc.

Our exisiting biz partners include conglomerates and enterprise alliance of Sinochem and since the president Xi’s comment, more and more companies reach out to us including Didi, Province-level officials etc.

Câu 5: How would you compare ARPA and Carry? Why should we vote for APRA?

Trả lời:

We alway get asked by this question.

Crypto industry is still at its infancy. So there is more collaboration than competition. Unfortunately only one goes to Binance. Here I share my view on ARPA vs Carry.

1) I believe at current token price ARPA airdrop is more valuable than CRE’s. After our mainnet launch at the end of this year, we will have big bounty programs “bootstrapping reward” to incentivize computation power providers. Early adopters can get outsized rewards for their participation.

2) From project perspective – ARPA serves as an infrastructure for secure data sharing, and aims to create massive data synergies for multiple industries. In long term we target individual data management and secure monetization, but we start with enterprises who are more in need of this tech. I personally think there are more use cases for ARPA as an data sharing infra enabled by cryptographic algorithm.

3) In terms of competitors, ARPA is on the cutting-edge of MPC research, the most promising privacy-preserving data tech known in cryptography. We have very few competitors and already delivered testnet to showcase what MPC is capable of.

4) ARPA is very international. Our team members speak 6 different languages we all have highly international background. Currently, we have over 70,000 supporters in our communities comprised of Chinese, English, Vietnamese, Korean, Russian, Thai, Indonesian and Filipino speakers. Soon we will expand to other countries for both business development and community building.

5) China is one of the largest markets for crypto and blockchains. China’s president Xi has announced a national-level, unprecedented support for blockchain technology and has set this as a national strategy. This is a historic opportunity not only for us, but also for our investors for sure ?

6) TOKEN BURN! We consistently buy back from the market and burn ARPA tokens with revenue from privacy-preserving data sharing solution for enterprise. In future we expect more people to use ARPA onchain for privacy preserving tasks and we will take a cut to burn token, something like a transaction fee for exchange. The circulation $$ for ARPA is much smaller than Carry, so given larger liquidity on Binance, price performance should be better for ARPA.