Initial Public Offering (IPO) on permissioned blockchain using secure multiparty computation

Abstract

In this work, we add secure multiparty computation capabilities to the permissioned blockchain architecture of Hyperledger Fabric, and use them to implement the clearing price mechanism for initial public offering (IPO). As with any blockchain, the core property in Fabric is that all peers must see the same ledger, so using confidential data on the ledger is a challenge. To address this challenge we use cryptographic secure multiparty computation (MPC), which requires that we integrate a few new mechanisms into the Fabric architecture. Specifically we need to let the peers access local information such as their respective secret keys, and also send messages to each other while executing smart contracts. We also had to add to Fabric a library that implements the required cryptographic tools, and to make that library accessible from the smart contracts. We demonstrated the effectiveness of this solution by using it to implement the clearing price mechanism for IPOs. We designed an efficient cryptographic protocol for the IPO clearing price mechanism, and used our integrated system to run it on Fabric. Although not fully optimized yet, the performance of the resulting implementation is more than fast enough for this particular application, ranging from 8 to 23 seconds to execute an IPO sale.