Tangle Network: Use Cases

Tangle Network enables various use cases, primarily focusing on enhancing privacy and improving cross-chain interoperability. Here are some key proposed applications:

1. Signing as a Service (TSSaaS)

Tangle provides signatures as a service using threshold cryptography, with validators participating in multi-party distributed key generation protocols to create keys for threshold signing. This enables the development of secure and decentralized:

• Custody Solutions: By requiring multiple custodians to authorize transactions jointly, TSS enhances asset security and provides flexible key management and recovery.

• Oracles: TSS enables a decentralized approach to handling oracle data, ensuring data accuracy and resilience to collusion by requiring consensus among signers.

• Cross-Chain Bridges: TSS boosts the security and reliability of cross-chain bridges by decentralizing signing authority, increasing resistance to attacks and collusion.

2. Interoperable Shielded Pools

The Tangle Network is ideal for maintaining the state of bridged shielded pools, enabling the creation of cross-chain private transaction systems. The Webb Protocol Anchor System provides an architecture for implementing various private bridge protocols, such as:

• Multi-Asset Shielded Bridges: The Variable Multi-Asset Anchor System enables users to transfer arbitrary amounts of different assets privately between blockchains using zero-knowledge proofs.

• Identity-Based Variable Asset Anchor System: By combining an identity protocol with the Variable Multi-Asset protocol, a cross-chain shielded pool application can be designed for a restricted identity set, enabling compliance or community-based private transaction systems.

3. Social and Identity Bridges

Tangle's infrastructure supports cross-chain social and identity bridges, enabling content and membership-based applications with customizable zero-knowledge proofs of membership:

• Interoperable Membership Groups / Semaphores: An extension of the Semaphore protocol to a cross-chain identity set, allowing members of NFT communities to register and interact privately across chains.

• Interoperable Badge System: Using expressive data blobs for proofs of ownership, participation, and identity, enabling composable application development with zero-knowledge and private data disclosure.

4. Expansion and Integration of MPC Capabilities

Tangle Network's MPC infrastructure can be expanded and integrated with various cryptographic protocols to enhance its capabilities:

• New Threshold Signature Schemes: Integrating schemes like ECDSA, Schnorr, BLS, and FROST to enhance security by distributing signature generation across multiple parties.

• Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE): Integrating FHE with MPC to enable secure and private computation on encrypted data across multiple parties.

• Randomness Beacons: Incorporating randomness beacons, like those from the League of Entropy, to enhance security and fairness in various cryptographic protocols.

• Federated Learning Protocols: Securely computing AI and ML models on distributed data without exposing the underlying data, enabling privacy-preserving data analysis and model training.

• Threshold Encryption Protocols: Integrating protocols that distribute encryption and decryption among multiple parties, enhancing data security.

• General MPC Compiler Infrastructure: Developing a general MPC compiler infrastructure to simplify the process of creating secure multi-party applications.