Hyper BC CEO Joseph Zhang: MPC technology will facilitate the deep binding of wallets to regulators.
On January 10th, the POWER Hong Kong Web3 Innovator Summit was held by the leading Chinese Web3 media, MarsBit, with the collaboration of Cyberport, the tech innovation district in Hong-Kong. The event was graced by the presence of Mr. Paul Chan, Financial Secretary of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government, who delivered a keynote speech.
Joseph Zhang, CEO of HyperBC, has participated in a roundtable on the topic of “Web3 Entry Revolution: MPC Wallet Experience and Popularization” with other industry leaders in attendance.
During the discussion, Joseph Zhang highlights the potential of MPC technology in facilitating the deep binding of wallets with regulators, and how this is a key step towards the successful popularization of Web3 and decentralized finance.
The more reliable solution after the market collapse
Joseph shared his views on the spontaneous withdrawal movement of users caused by the FTX thunderstorm from two perspectives. First, he discussed the market dimension of this event. After the FTX thunderstorm incident, the sales volume of hardware wallets such as Ledger reached a record high, and the inflow of multi-signature smart contract wallets like Gnosis Safe exceeded $800 million. Additionally, MPC wallets like Zengo saw an all-time high in user deposits, indicating a strong market response towards decentralized wallets.
Joseph has also pointed the trend from the capital perspective, pointing out that the entire industry financing for 2022 is about 27 billion dollars, with infrastructure accounting for 7.5 billion dollars and decentralized wallets making up a significant proportion. He highlighted that both market and capital signals are pointing towards decentralization being the trend, and the key is to balance security, ease of use, and scalability. He added that different use cases may require different settings such as custody, self-management, semi-custody, and multi-dimensional asset management.
The trend of MPC wallet
Joseph emphasized that MPC wallets are still in the early stages of rapid growth and the concept is gaining popularity. Currently, there are many MPC wallets available in the market with each one having its own main business process and target audience. However, the HyperBC team has found that implementing MPC enterprise services is challenging as the algorithm layer is complex and requires a high level of technical expertise and investment. He also pointed out that without a solid engineering background in blockchain, it may result in significant security problems. As a member of the MPC alliance, HyperBC often shares and collaborates with Web2 giants and MPC technology pioneers, which they believe will bring significant benefits to the promotion and implementation of MPC technology at this stage.
Security as the core value
Joseph believes that the most important and biggest challenge for wallet development is security. He stressed that while security is the basic skill of any wallet, it is also the biggest challenge and requires a holistic approach that goes beyond technical security alone. This includes aspects such as audit, anti-money laundering (AML), compliance, licensing, insurance, and other integrated security capabilities. He suggested exploring the combination of technology and compliance, such as designing a more complete private key sharding storage scheme, deploying some private key sharding on auditors or specific compliance agencies, and implementing the deep binding between wallets and regulators through MPC technology to improve the confidence of users and the market.
At the end of the roundtable discussion, Joseph provided a summary and outlook on the past, present, and future of HyperBC in the B2B sector. He noted that the current application of MPC wallets is mostly focused on WAAS (wallet-as-a-service) and custody solutions. HyperBC has optimized its products in specific fields by building on this foundation, from waas receipt and payment to fine customization of risk control strategies on co-managed wallets, and then to cold wallets to form a closed loop. This is aimed at enabling small and medium-sized enterprises to better serve their own business needs and address infrastructure concerns such as wallet security.
He also highlighted that MPC technology has the potential to solve other pain points in the industry, such as managing smart contract permissions. HyperBC has recently developed small but effective tools that use MPC technology to optimize the management of Owner permissions. By correlating the smart contract address, the ABI contract interface was fully resolved, and the Owner’s private key authority was replaced by the MPC fragment private key. This allows for the decentralization of Owner authority through a piece of private key allocated to the Dao organization for management.
Lastly, Joseph talked about the recent proposal of ERC 4337, which brings new interest in account abstraction (AA) technology. HyperBC team is also thinking about the possibilities, for example, can MPC+AA model be used to realize the inheritance of digital heritage, etc. He mentioned that this is still in the very early stage of exploration, but it does bring a lot of imagination to the field.
In summary, HyperBC is a leading provider of asset custody solutions, with over 10 years of technical experience and cutting-edge security and risk control technology. It offers a wide range of customized services and scalable solutions for enterprises, including HyperPay wallet, HyperCard digital currency credit card, Hpay payment, digital currency ATM machine and other core products. Multi-Party Computation (MPC) is a cryptographic security scheme that enables off-chain verification by performing multi-party computation on private keys. MPC wallets replace the original private key with private key fragments, which can be stored in different places and use set of MPC protocols to obtain a legal signature through a distributed multi-round interaction, improving overall security.
