Multi-Party Computation (MPC)

Multi-party computation is a solution for securing data among several participants in a private manner. It allows many parties, each with their own private data, to verify the final computation without revealing their own secret portion of the data. Each participant in an MPC possesses a piece of confidential information. Typically, in the case of bridges, one entity owns one part of a cryptographic key that can move funds or change code. MPCs are (generally) utilized when a bridging system has multiple and/or a permissionless relayer set and is looking to eliminate one bad actor as a single point of failure. MPCs shard a private key into many segments, with each individual possessing a portion of the private key. When signing a transaction, a subset of MPC nodes must independently sign the transaction and communicate then communicate it to the larger group.