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Overview

Welcome to Ika​

Ika is the first sub-second MPC network, delivering unmatched scalability with the ability to scale to 10,000 signatures per second (tps) and support hundreds or even thousands of signer nodes with zero-trust, noncollusive security. Utilizing dWallets — programmable, decentralized signing mechanisms — as building blocks, builders can control native assets in other chains directly from their smart contract securely.

Unique Value of Ika​

Ika was created by some of the world’s leading cryptography experts and is redefining the state of the art for MPC networks:

  1. High Throughput: Ika can scale to process thousands of signatures per second, making it the first scalable decentralized MPC infrastructure.
  2. Low Latency: While legacy MPC networks lag with high latency, Ika can operate at sub-second speeds, enabling real-time applications across chains.
  3. Decentralization: Ika transcends the node limit of MPC networks, and can scale to hundreds of nodes generating signatures together.
  4. Zero-Trust Security: Ika allows builders to cryptographically require the user in the signature generation process, eliminating trust and ensuring user asset security.

By doing that, Ika provides builders with the flexibility to implement any logic (custody, DeFi, gaming, etc.) across any blockchain, including Bitcoin. Builders can now create dApps that have:

  • Unrivaled speed: record-breaking throughput and sub-second latency for cross-chain transactions, supporting real-time applications and institutional-scale demand.
  • Unlimited Access: Capable of signing transactions for virtually any blockchain by supporting common signing algorithms—currently ECDSA, soon EdDSA and Schnorr.
  • Zero Trust Security: Users can be cryptographically required for a signature to be generated—noncollusive. No other party can generate a signature without the user.
  • Massive Decentralization: The 2PC-MPC protocol enables the participation of hundreds, or even thousands, of signers in the signature process.
  • Native Interoperability: No Bridging, No Wrapping. Controlling native assets directly, allowing for logic enforcement across Web3 without derivatives.

Cryptography of dWallets — 2PC-MPC​

dWallets use the 2PC-MPC protocol, a two-party ECDSA protocol we designed specifically for dWallets, where the second party is fully emulated by a network of N parties.

Besides its novel structure, enabling the noncollusive dWallets and the autonomy and flexibility of a permissionless Network of dWallets (Ika), the 2PC-MPC protocol also dramatically improves upon the latest MPC protocols, allowing the dWallet Network to be scalable and massively-decentralized.

The 2PC-MPC protocol achieves linear-scaling in communication — O(n) — and due to novel aggregation and amortization techniques, an amortized cost per-party that remains constant up to thousands of parties — practically O(1) in computation for the network, allowing it to scale and achieve decentralization, whilst being asymptotically O(1) for the user: meaning the size of the network doesn't have any impact on the user as its computation and communication is constant.

Ika Network Overview​

Ika is an MPC network forked from Sui, and similarly to Sui, it is maintained by a permissionless set of authorities that play a role similar to validators or miners in other blockchain systems. Ika modified Sui in several ways, including disabling smart contracts, implementing 2PC-MPC, and using the communication in Sui's consensus Mysticeti for the MPC protocol between the nodes.

As a composable modular signature network, dWallets on Ika are controlled by smart contracts on other networks. To allow a smart contract on another chain, like Sui, to control a dWallet, state proofs for that chain must be available on the Ika Network in the form of light clients. Currently, Sui state proofs are the first to be implemented, so Sui builders can use dWallets as building blocks in their smart contracts.

Ika has a native token called IKA that will be launched as a coin on Sui blockchain. IKA is used (much like SUI) to pay for "gas" and is also used as a delegated stake on authorities within an epoch. The voting power of authorities within this epoch is a function of this delegated stake. Authorities are periodically reconfigured according to the stake delegated to them. In any epoch, the set of authorities is Byzantine fault-tolerant. At the end of the epoch, fees collected through all transactions processed are distributed to authorities according to their contribution to the operation of the system. Authorities can in turn share some fees as rewards to users that delegated stakes to them.

Sui is backed by several state-of-the-art peer-reviewed works and years of open source development that we are building upon with Ika.

More About Ika​

Use the following links to learn more about Ika and its ecosystem:

Acknowledgement​

As a fork of Sui, much of Ika's code base is heavily based on the code created by Mysten Labs, Inc. & Facebook, Inc. and its affiliates, including in this very file. We are grateful for the high quality and serious work that allowed us to build our dWallet technology upon this infrastructure.