SMPC Nodes

Secure Multi-Party Computation (SMPC)

It may not seem like it, but you may be using secure multi-party computation every day without even realizing it. For instance, when you use your bank's website to make a payment, it likely uses secure multi-party computing to keep your account number secret while still telling the other party how much money was transferred.

The ARMswap's protocol is based on an independent network of nodes, separate from any of the blockchain protocols with which it interacts. This network of nodes is called Secure Multi-Party Computation (SMPC), and network members collectively sign transactions with private private key segments to initiate the creation and release of tokens.

Assets on the source blockchain are locked in wallets which are generated by the SMPC network. These escrowed assets are then mirrored 1:1 on the destination blockchain by assets created by the smart contract and sent to the user's wallet. When assets are returned to the smart contract, the SMPC network initiates a contract to burn the tokens and release the assets to the user's wallet in the source blockchain.

The private key that controls the wallets and the smart contracts that manage the tokens at each end of the bridge are distributed among this network of nodes using a distributed key generation algorithm. As a result, each node independently owns part of the private key and knows only its part of the private key. There is no way somebody ever knows the entire private key. The private key is not recovered when transactions are signed, and the full set of private keys owned by a node never appears together, meaning that the private key can never be revealed. This prevents there being a single point of failure in the protocol and ensures both decentralization and security.