2.2 MPC in Tholos

MPC works by breaking down sensitive data into multiple parts and distributing those parts among multiple participants. Each participant performs their own computation on their respective part of the data, and the results are combined to arrive at the final output.

For example, if you wanted to securely store a private key for a wallet holding a collection of digital assets, you could split that key into multiple parts and distribute those parts among multiple participants. Each participant would then store their respective part of the key in a secure manner, and no individual participant would have access to the full key.

When the key is needed, the participants would use MPC to collaborate and combine their respective parts to generate the full key. Since no individual participant has access to the full key, the security of the key is significantly increased.

In the digital asset context, MPC enables secure and functional custody and treasury management. Organizations are able to benefit from removing a “single point of failure,” whilst maintaining the core benefits of many EOA-style wallets.

Tholos uses a cutting-edge MPC implementation deliver not only the core benefits of MPC, but to go even further and prodide a faster and more secure experience than our competitors

We use two MPC implementations in order to support EVM blockchains and beyond:

EdDSA

We have an RFC-compliant FROST implementation.

ECDSA

We have a DKLs19 implementation.

DKLs19 was chosen as it allows for threshold signing with ECDSA without adding any additional security assumptions.

This is in contrast to other more commonly implemented schemes such as GG/CMP20 that require additional security assumptions to that of single-signer ECDSA, and the maths used in these schemes has been shown time and time again to be very tough to implement securely.