Automata: The Solution for Privacy in Web 3.0
While transparency is a core tenet of Web 3.0, a segment of users have been concerned with the completely open records of their on-chain behaviour. Potential privacy leakages and security threats associated with transfers across protocols have become pertinent threats to their usage. With DeFi already at $63.45B in TVL (according to DeFi Pulse), these threats call for urgent action.
Enter Automata.
Automata Network provides a seamless, decentralised privacy solution for dApps across multi-chain ecosystems. It is built based on industry-leading cryptography, privacy-protection algorithms, and hardware trusted platforms. Compared to other privacy-focused projects such as Oasis and Enigma, Automata’s solution offers frictionless computation, high assurance, and speedy cross-chain transactions, allowing various DeFi protocols to address privacy and security issues.
The Conveyor product protects against MEV.
According to Flashbots, miners/nodes have extracted approximately $700 million worth of MEV since January 2020. Automata offers a solution to the malicious manipulation by introducing Conveyor to determine the order of transmitted transactions. As its name suggests, the solution acts like a conveyor belt that orders transactions appropriately, preventing the “sandwich attacks” that miners use to re-order transactions and consequently increase the price that users pay for them.
Conveyor stands out from other MEV solutions with privacy, by reducing access pattern leakage (which could lead to private key exposure) through the Oblivious RAM algorithm. The Automata team is the first to have implemented the algorithm in blockchain, and has conducted extensive research on it to enhance dApp privacy. They currently maintain an open-source Wiki about MEV and have recently released a tool, MEV.Tax, for individuals to check if users have been sandwich attacked.
Automata’s Witness product ensures privacy in governance
By integrating Witness, users can make proposals and vote off-chain without revealing their identities. It also incentivises token holders’ participation with zero gas. With its simple interface, users can submit proposals and invite community members to vote. The votes are sent to a privacy relayer, and the results are based on the privacy level selected when the proposal was created. That way, voting results can be viewed at a glance and voters’ identities are safeguarded when they vote!
As an early supporter of Automata Network, Longhash Ventures is impressed with the team’s traction, R&D capabilities, and deep understanding of the DeFi ecosystem. The ATA token has just been listed on Binance, and they have already integrated chains such as Ethereum, BSC, Clover Testnet, and the Dusty Testnet by Plasm Network, one of the graduates from our Polkadot accelerator cohort. Additionally, Automata has been selected for the Berkeley Blockchain Xcelerator in 2021 and received a grant from the Web3 Foundation in 2020.
As blockchain transitions into a user-governed, multi-chain, multi-layered era, users and developers will have an ever-increasing need for privacy and system security. In this backdrop, Automata could prove to be indispensable from the Web 3 ecosystem.
Disclaimer: This is not financial advice. LongHash Ventures holds positions in the assets mentioned.
LongHash Ventures is an investment fund and accelerator focused on catalysing the growth of the native Web 3.0 economy. To enable true ownership, permissionless access, and trustless interactions, we launched a $15m DeFi-focused fund and invested in projects such as Balancer, Acala Network, Instadapp, and Zapper. We have also partnered with Polkadot and Filecoin to accelerate more than 40 global Web 3 projects which have raised more than $100m in the past 18 months. Through such investments and venture building, we are committed to realising our vision where anyone can access a more transparent, secure, and decentralised Web.
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