https://medium.com/@guqianfeng/overcoming-the-two-mountains-of-web-3-0-david-chaums-xx-network-5819a289b4e8

Web3.0 is a Tokenized network, a network where information and value are freely generated, transacted and exchanged, and it is next generation Internet, an Internet full of wealth. Countless companies, teams and individuals are exploring and moving forward on the road to Web 3.0. This includes industry of Internet, gaming, e-commerce, blockchain, decentralized finance (DEFI), distributed storage, NFT, etc.

The road to Web3.0 is full of difficulties and hopes. Especially, there are two big mountains in front, which are becoming clearer and closer as the pioneers move forward.

The names of these two mountains are: Privacy Security and Quantum Security.

Among the world’s leading cryptographers today, there is a very respectable predecessor, who is named as the “Godfather of Cryptocurrency”, the pioneer of cyber security, the initiator of cryptopunk, the founder of the world’s first cryptocurrency eCash, the founder of International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR), the idol or mentor of several “suspected” Satoshi Nakamoto, and the spiritual leader of the global cryptography. He is also known by some as the “time traveler” because of his accurate judgment and vision of the future.

In the past five years, he has led his team to work silently, just like the ancient Chinese Yugong. Although he has missed many wonderful windfall, and not in the spotlight frequently, he has pioneered a path for those young people who are still on the road of Web3.0 to go over these two mountains. Perhaps those who are buried in the advancement of people have not seen these two mountains, perhaps not even aware of the existence of these two mountains, but when they approach these two mountains, looking up at the peaks of the sky, found insurmountable, desperate and fearful, the mountains will come out of an old man with a white beard, will point to the entrance of a path, and said: Welcome, the warriors of the times, please walk here over the mountain.

The name of This old man with white beard is David Chaum, the founder of xxnetwork.

Technically, xxnetwork is the first time to efficiently protect the privacy of user’s metadata, the first time to realize large-scale information and value translation on public network securely, the first time to realize stateful hash-based past-quantum signature algorithm on decentralized network, and the first time to realize privacy protection of both ledger and smart contract on blockchain.

The applications of the xx network include but not limited to: secure transaction and privacy protection of commercial data, financial data, government data, digital assets, digital certificates, signatures, passwords etc., which can significantly save the investment of enterprises and organization in secure communication and ensure that the above data and digital assets are protected from incalculable losses due to cracking under the threat of quantum computers.

Privacy protection and cyber security on the Internet have been gaining more and more attention, and how to effectively protect personal information, business information, and organizational data on the Internet has been highly valued by governments, enterprises, organizations, and individuals. Especially when it comes to e-payment, e-identities, instant messaging and email, Nobody can cover losses. Currently, there are two main types of protection technical: hardware/hardware environmental, and software/software environmental protection. Some rich enterprises and organizations can setup LANs, private clouds, hardware firewalls, etc. to physically cut off the link to the Internet or strengthen the security of data entry and exit. The software solutions includes SSL/TLS issued by trusted CA authorities, encrypted files, encrypted communications, and other cryptographic solutions.

On the other hand, with the rapid development of quantum computation technology, quantum computers are an increasing threat to cryptography, especially public key cryptography, which means that cryptography-based network security solutions will fail. This is the reason for the rapid development of post-quantum cryptography (PQC) in recent years. 2016 to date, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has launched three rounds of a worldwide collection, screening and competition of quantum-resistant algorithms. The aim is to propose and establish standards for quantum-resistant algorithms in areas such as digital signatures and public-key encryption and key-establishment, which are most vulnerable to quantum attacks. Not only the United States, but also other major countries, including China, are investing heavily in quantum-resistant algorithms to avoid the “quantum hegemony” brought about by the breakthrough of quantum computing technology in other countries. Quantum computing and anti-quantum algorithms have become another battleground between major countries similar to the Nuclear Arms Race.

The research of anti-quantum algorithms is just the first step. The challenge is to update the existing cryptographic algorithms, such as RSA, as seamlessly and quickly as possible.

The xx network was born to solve these two problems. After 5 years of research and development led by David Chaum, the team has been the first to implement a quantum-secure and privacy-protected decentralized network. In this article, we cite a few scenarios to reveal the value of xx network, and hope that more friends will join the ecosystem to innovate more application and create more value.

Scenario I: Cross-chain transactions and swap

Since April this year, there have been a number of security incidents in DEFI, with most attacks focused on cross-chain projects, causing losses that have totaled up to $1 billion.

From the analysis of attacks by some security companies, almost all attacks against cross-chain platforms have focused on the private keys of custodian accounts. Therefore, how to keep private keys safe is the core tech of cross-chain security.

David Chaum is now leading another team to develop a cross-chain platform named Liquifinity, which is based on xx network to keep the private keys of custodian accounts, so that no team member or third party can control the private keys and “steal” assets.

Scenario 2: privacy protection of commercial information

All enterprises require data exchange with other business partners, such as providing design drawings, marketing materials to distributors, engineering design, business data and reports to regulators. Companies will use email, FTP, online drives, OA system and BPM system.

Nowadays, many employees of enterprises discuss business on public instant messengers such as WeChat or public email service such as gmail, and even transmit important documents involving business secrets. These software originally for normal communication suddenly becomes a business communication tool, which will certainly generate a lot of data leakage risk.

Over the past year, because of Covid-19, a large number of people work at home using these unsafe communication tools. Making this security risk even more prominent and significantly increasing the business risks of enterprises and organizations.

Few powerful enterprises have established their own OA systems, instant messengers systems, email systems, and file systems for data storage and sharing. Data is saved on their own servers. But for most small and medium-sized enterprises that cannot afford huge expence, they can only take the risk of their business privacy information and have to use the public services provided by third-partys.

The xx message (instant messaging tool) developed by the xx team is already online and provides a good use case for full privacy protected communication. Many companies and organizations can use this instant messenger with confidence and without worries of information leakage. In addition, anybody can also use xxDK, which is already online, to develop independent and fully controlled privacy-secure communication tools, email, OA or BPM systems at low cost. These systems and tools run on xx network, and business privacy is highly protected without building their own servers.

Scenario 3: Digital Certificate protection

Nowadays, digital certificates have penetrated into every aspect of our lives, from online shopping, online banking, e-payment and e-identity to surfing on web by https protocol. All of these need digital certificates. The vast majority of digital certificates use RSA algorithm, which will be easily cracked by quantum computers in the future, which means that almost all of digital certificates now will be at risk and must be upgraded. This upgrade could potentially be done quickly in a centralized organization. But in fact, there will be a large number of decentralized digital certificate need upgrade, which will be at risk when they cannot be completed in a short time.

xxnetwork provides a smooth upgrade solution to solve this problem, and a large number of decentralized digital certificates can be securely protected by xxnetwork.

Scenario 4: Password Protection

Compared with digital certificates based on public/private cryptography, the username-password based login is more widely used. Most users set simple passwords for convenience. Even if an ordinary person uses a strong password, it will be invincible in front of a quantum computer.

The xxnetwork protects such risky passwords by breaking up the encrypted passwords and obfuscating them during transaction, so that the encrypted passwords cannot be “sniffed” and even the most powerful quantum computers cannot crack the user’s password if they do not have the complete encrypted password

Scenario 5: Quantum-resistant cryptocurrency

Now, many countries are starting to issue digital currencies, including the digitization of fiat currencies (e.g., our DCEP) and the fiatization of decentralized digital currencies (e.g., El Salvador’s use of Bitcoin as a fiat currency). In either form, public-key cryptography is used, and must face a huge threat from quantum computers in the future. A quantum-computer attack on a country’s fiat currency would seriously threaten a country’s economy and finance.

The xxnetwork has successfully deployed hash-based stateful quantum-resistant algorithms on decentralized networks, which is quite a great initiative in the cryptography community. While protecting the assets on the xx chain in the post-quantum era, it also provides a solution and best practice for the smooth update to quantum-resistant cryptocurrency for most blockchain, such as Ethereum, etc.

Scenario 6: A more secure Metaverse

At the end of June this year, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would become a “metaverse” company within five years. This make metaverse suddenly hot.

The definition of metaverse on Wikipedia is:

A 3D virtual space with link perception and sharing characteristics based on the future Internet, which is characterized by convergence and physical persistence through virtual augmented physical reality, and its essence is: parallel universe.

Both Facebook and hot “metaverse” games are currently focusing on the user experience. Whether it’s virtual reality(VR) or augmented reality(AR), they are all trying to satisfy users with immersive experiences and virtual scenarios.

AXE Infinity, a blockchain game, has recently become very popular, and has taken the lead in introducing digital assets into the metaverse game.

Behind these, there have been a series of security questions: Are your assets in the metaverse safe? Is the privacy of your life in the metaverse effectively protected? Is your communication with others in the metaverse safe? Are the people and organizations you deal with in the metaverse trustworthy? Once we enter the post-quantum era, will the metaverse that we have built up so easily collapse?

If metaverse will become the norm of future life, privacy and quantum security are two mountains that cannot be bypassed. xxnetwork will provide the infrastructure to build a more secure metaverse.

Scenario 7: Privacy protection, and privacy computation

Nowadays, major countries have issued laws related to data security, and have made clearer provisions for data collection, storage, transaction, provision and disclosure, while the core aspects of the data life cycle, i.e., the use and processing of data, and the definition of data ownership and use rights, are relatively vague.

The important reason why users’ data privacy is not effectively protected for a long period of time is that the data is easy to have privacy risk while it is used and processed, and the lack of clear legal definition and technical guarantee in the ownership of data.

Blockchain and privacy computing are the key technologies to solve the above two problems, but they have their own role. Blockchain’s consensus solves the problem of data ownership rights. Privacy computation solves the problem of privacy protection of data while using.

Currently, privacy computing technologies include but are not limited to: federation computation, secure multi-party computation (sMPC), zero-knowledge proof, trusted computing environment (TEE), secret sharing, obfuscation circuit, inadvertent transmission, homomorphic encryption, etc.

The xxMPC solution based on xxnetwork proposes a new smart contract and multi-party computation protocol that surpasses the functionality, scalability and performance of existing smart contracts and multi-party secure computing.

All of the above privacy computation solutions, except trusted hardware (e.g., TEE), are based on cryptographic protocols that perform the required computations in a predictable manner through specific nodes. In contrast, xxMPC is based on xxnetwork privacy communication, which opens a whole new world for MPC.

Among the above seven application scenarios, from the perspective of blockchain practitioners, most of them may belong to non-blockchain applications, and it is these non-blockchain applications that make the value of xxnetwork unlimited. It is the infrastructure of the future Internet, the infrastructure of the web 3.0 era, and the infrastructure of the meta-universe.

This may be the future that David Chaum, a great cryptographer and known as the “time traveler”, sees, and it is the vision and mission of xxnetwork to open up a path for Web 3.0 explorers on the mountains of quantum security and privacy security. What’s more, it is the value of xxnetwork as a trillion dollar market cap Web3.0 infrastructure. These applications and scenarios will bring far more value into xxnetwork.