Fairblock, a company co-founded by Cheriton School of Computer Science master’s graduate Peyman Momeni, has secured $2.5 million to build infrastructure to bring conditional encryption and pre-execution privacy to blockchains.
The recent funding round was led by Galileo Ventures and supported by a consortium of investment firms that include Lemniscap, Dialectic, Robot Ventures, GSR, Chorus One, Dorahacks, and Reverie, as well as several angel investors.
Among the most important aspects of blockchain technology are its decentralization and the immutability of blocks. However, transactions and messages in decentralized applications running on blockchains are not encrypted, which exposes them to malicious parties. Financial transactions can be exploited because sensitive data is leaked before they are executed. And, in other applications, lack of encryption can limit transparent auctions and private voting mechanisms.
Peyman
Momeni
graduated
with
a
master’s
degree
in
computer
science
in
July
2022.
His
thesis,
titled
“FairBlock:
Preventing
Blockchain
Front-running
with
Minimal
Overheads,”
developed
identity-based
encryption
to
prevent
front-running,
a
family
of
strategies
in
which
a
malicious
party
can
manipulate
the
order
of
transactions
in
a
blockchain.
He
is
now
applying
this
research
to
his
company
to
protect
users
by
bringing
conditional
encryption
and
decryption
to
blockchains.
“We are enabling protocols that will allow users to protect the content of their transaction during the execution of the application. It’s like HTTPS for the Internet of the future,” Peyman explained. “The key point is that blockchains can help us to build more trustful decentralized applications, but it also comes with some risk of malicious activities because you are leaking the contents of your activity during the interaction with these applications. At Fairblock, we are encrypting transactions to protect users during their interaction with the applications, ensuring their transactions remain private and secure.”
Fairblock will accomplish this by applying expertise in applied cryptography — including identity-based encryption and fully homomorphic encryption, which allows computation on encrypted data — to protect users from exploitation by malicious parties that are observing the communication, unlocking new decentralized applications that better serve users.
“We will use the funding to hire the best talent, the best developers and researchers in the space to build these advanced cryptography technologies,” Peyman said.
“My co-founder Bowen You and most of our team at Fairblock are from the University of Waterloo. There is an incredible amount of talent here. In fact, Waterloo is an epicentre of blockchain technology, arguably starting with Vitalik Buterin, a Cheriton student who co-founded Ethereum, a decentralized blockchain, and it continues with Liam Horne of Optimism, a protocol for scaling Ethereum. And of course, with Axelar, a company that secures cross-chain communications that was co-founded by my master’s supervisor, Professor Sergey Gorbunov.”