In the early stages of Multi-Party Computation (MPC), schemes were designed around centralized use cases. Approaches like federated MPC required trusted intermediaries or direct peer-to-peer communication between participants. These systems worked for small, controlled environments but lacked scalability and decentralization—qualities essential for today’s permissionless blockchain ecosystems. They were inefficient when applied to larger, more dynamic networks, making them impractical for modern decentralized applications.

As blockchain ecosystems have expanded—featuring multiple networks or "zones of sovereignty"—a scalable, decentralized MPC model has become crucial. Earlier schemes were not built to ensure zero trust across these zones, particularly when users or assets interact between blockchains. This led to reliance on centralized, "castle-and-moat" security models, which compromised decentralization and trustlessness in favor of interoperability, and created huge honeypots.

Ika’s 2PC-MPC scheme introduces a new model for decentralized signing, offering scalability, security, and speed. It eliminates the constraints of legacy MPC models, providing a network that can scale to hundreds or even thousands of nodes while maintaining zero trust and delivering unrivaled performance. Ika’s innovations represent a fundamental shift in how decentralized networks function.

What Makes Ika’s 2PC-MPC Scheme Revolutionary? A Scalable Network Built for Mass Participation

A key feature of Ika’s 2PC-MPC scheme is its ability to scale without compromising performance. Traditional MPC relied on point-to-point communication, which led to message complexity of O(n²), as each participant communicated directly with every other participant. This created significant overhead, limiting the scalability of such systems as the network grew.

Ika changes this by using broadcast communication instead of point-to-point unicast. With broadcast communication, messages are sent to the entire network, reducing complexity to O(n). This shift drastically lowers the communication burden, allowing Ika to scale to hundreds of nodes and 10,000 signatures per second (tps) while maintaining sub-second latency.

To further enhance performance, Ika employs batching and amortization techniques. Batching processes multiple transactions together, while amortization spreads the computational cost across multiple operations. These innovations reduce complexity from the point of view of the user to practically O(1), enabling efficient handling of real-time, large-scale computations. This makes Ika particularly well-suited for decentralized finance (DeFi), custody solutions, and cross-chain interoperability.

Zero Trust Across Zones of Sovereignty

Blockchains inherently operate within zero-trust principles, where no participant is trusted by default. However, when an application interacts with assets or data across different "zones of sovereignty"—such as separate blockchains—centralized trust points are often introduced, compromising the zero-trust model. These centralized gateways, using the outdated castle-and-moat approach, become vulnerable points of failure.

Ika extends zero trust across zones of sovereignty, ensuring that interactions between blockchains remain decentralized and secure. The 2PC-MPC scheme requires both the user and the network to collaborate in cryptographic operations. Each participant holds only part of the secret (a "secret share"), so no single entity can act independently. Even if network nodes are compromised, user assets remain secure, as the network cannot generate a valid signature without the user’s active participation.

This model guarantees that users retain control over their assets, even as transactions are processed by the decentralized network. Ika’s use of zero-knowledge proofs and homomorphic encryption ensures that all cryptographic operations are publicly verifiable, preventing malicious behavior and ensuring transparency. By requiring both user and network participation, Ika eliminates the need for trusted intermediaries, creating a true zero-trust environment—even across multiple blockchains.

This model is especially crucial for decentralized custody solutions, where security is paramount. By ensuring that user assets are safe even if parts of the network become compromised, Ika delivers a level of security beyond what traditional decentralized networks can offer. Users can trust that their assets remain secure, regardless of any internal threats within the network.

Massively Decentralized: Ensuring Resilience and Security

At the core of Ika’s architecture is a massively decentralized node setup that strengthens the network’s security and scalability. Unlike traditional systems that rely on a limited number of nodes, usually between 4-8 nodes, Ika’s 2PC-MPC scheme can operate across hundreds or even thousands of independent nodes. Each node holds a fragment of the network decryption key, ensuring that no single entity or group can control or manipulate the signing process.

This node distribution is critical to Ika’s zero-trust model, which requires both the user and the network to participate in every cryptographic operation. Even if some nodes attempt to collude, they cannot generate a valid signature without the user's active involvement, ensuring user assets remain protected.

In addition, Ika’s nodes communicate via broadcast channels, avoiding the high overhead of point-to-point communication. This allows Ika to maintain low-latency operations, enabling sub-second finality even when scaling to a very large number of nodes. This decentralized structure makes Ika resilient against attacks and node failures, ensuring continuous operation and security, even as the network scales.

Fast, Parallel Processing built on Sui's Groundbreaking Tech

Speed has often been a challenge for decentralized networks, particularly when handling computationally intensive tasks like MPC. Ika overcomes this limitation through parallel processing, which allows the network to split computations across multiple nodes, completing them simultaneously. This results in sub-second finality for signatures, far outpacing previous MPC models.

In addition to parallelization, Ika leverages batching and amortization to reduce computational overhead. Batching enables the network to process transactions in groups, while amortization spreads the computational cost across multiple operations. These techniques, coupled with broadcast communication, significantly lower the load on individual nodes while maintaining the system’s security.

With these innovations, Ika can scale to 10,000 signatures per second, ensuring both speed and scalability. This makes it ideal for high-frequency trading, DeFi, and gaming—applications where real-time performance is critical.

This is made possible thanks to Sui's innovative object-centric model and its highly efficient consensus mechanism - Mysticeti. Sui organizes data into independent objects, enabling parallel processing without the need for global agreement on each transaction. This parallelization drastically reduces latency while maintaining high throughput. Additionally, Sui leverages Mysticeti's Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG)-based consensus, which minimizes message delays and signature overhead. By eliminating explicit block certification and enabling immediate block commits, Sui achieves sub-second finality, ensuring that Ika can scale to thousands of transactions per second while preserving decentralization and security​​.

Unlocking the Future of Decentralized Applications

Ika’s 2PC-MPC scheme represents more than just an incremental improvement—it is a fundamental shift in how decentralized networks operate. By combining broadcast communication, parallel processing, and a zero-trust architecture, Ika sets a new standard for speed, scalability, and security in decentralized systems.

This innovative approach ensures that networks can scale efficiently while users retain full control over their assets, even in worst-case scenarios. With its ability to scale to thousands of transactions per second and deliver sub-second finality, Ika positions itself as a leader in decentralized computation. As Web3 continues to evolve, Ika’s advancements will pave the way for the next generation of decentralized applications, ensuring a trustless, secure, and high-performance future.