ARPA Partners with JD.Com To Offer Secure Multi-Party Computation to Financial Institutions

4 min readJun 19, 2020

June 15th, 2020 / ARPA, the cutting-edge secure multi-party computation (sMPC) company, has partnered with Chinese e-commerce giant, JD.com, to implement ARPA’s novel technology platform. ARPA’s blockchain-based computation network will be integrated with JD Digits’ data platform to provide a suite of features for its clients.

“We believe privacy is the cornerstone of finance and business. With ARPA privacy-preserving computation, JD’s institutional clients will have peace of mind that their data is kept encrypted all the way during the analysis,” says Cao Yi of JD Digits. JD Digits is the technology subsidiary of JD.com, NASDAQ listed company with $100 billion market cap.

Secure multi-party computation (sMPC) evolved out of a paper written by Yao C. Yao in 1982, elucidating “The Millionaire Problem” and proposing the early concept of the technology. The idea of sMPC is to enable multiple parties to compute a function with consensus among the participants, without revealing any explicit data about the parties — privacy is preserved.

“Privacy-preserving computation is gradually being adopted and applied to financial and insurance risk control, OTC price consensus, asset management, digital marketing, and other fields,” details Felix Xu, Co-Founder & CEO of ARPA. “At the same time, privacy-preserving computation practitioners are actively promoting the standardization of this technology.”

The ARPA and JD.com partnership means that sMPC’s privacy technology will encompass a variety of uses within JD.com’s digital and finance subsidiary.

“JD.com’s asset management platform can provide financial institution customers with various financial models for pricing, risk control, and other fields,” says Cao Yi of JD Digits. “One of the use cases for sMPC is the Value at Risk model (VaR). Financial institutions use the VaR model to measure the overall risk exposure in stocks and bonds. They want to keep the data of their positions private — the model parameters of fintech companies also need to be kept hidden. ARPA’s privacy-preserving computation solution provides a secure API for both parties and can be deployed on each party’s server.”

The position data of financial institutions and the model parameters of technology companies are encrypted for safe multi-party calculations. The final output, the VaR value, is available to financial institutions without sacrificing their privacy. Efficiency of the VaR secure computation is satisfiable, and the whole process takes less than a couple minutes.

The joint initiative by ARPA and JD.com follows in the footsteps of China’s official outlay for sMPC technology titled: “Technical Requirements and Test Methods for Data Circulation Products Based on Secure Multiparty Computation.” ARPA was one of the formulating members of the program, and its partnership with JD.com is a manifestation of the technology’s transition from academia to industry.

About JD.com

JD.com is one of China’s biggest e-commerce platforms covering a wide range of consumer products, particularly electronics. JD.com has significantly invested in AI and drone delivery technology and currently maintains the most comprehensive drone delivery infrastructure globally. JD.com’s asset management platform caters to financial institutions in China and the SE Asian region.

About ARPA

ARPA is a blockchain-based solution for privacy-preserving computation, enabled by Multi-Party Computation (“MPC”). Founded in April 2018, the goal of ARPA is to separate data utility from ownership, and enable data renting. ARPA’s MPC protocol creates ways for multiple entities to collaboratively analyze data and extract data synergies, while keeping each party’s data input private and secure. ARPA allows secret sharing of private data, and the correctness of computation is verifiable using information-theoretic Message Authentication Code (MAC).

Developers can build privacy-preserving dApps on blockchains compatible with ARPA. Some immediate use cases include: credit anti-fraud, secure data wallet, precision marketing, joint AI model training, key management systems, etc. For example, banks using the ARPA network can share their credit blacklist with each other for risk management purposes without exposing their customer data or privacy.

Team members have worked at leading institutions such as Google, Amazon, Huawei, Fosun, Tsinghua University, Fidelity Investments. ARPA is currently assisting the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology in setting the national standard for secure multi-party computation. ARPA is a corporate member of MPC Alliance and IEEE and is in partnership with fortune 500 companies to implement proof-of-concepts and MPC products. In 2019, ARPA was named as the Top 10 most innovative blockchain companies in China by China Enterprise News and China Software Industry Association.

For more information about ARPA, or to join our team, please contact us at about@arpachain.io.

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