An interview with CEO Shahaf Bar-Geffen

COTI is one of the oldest projects in the field of cryptography, and we had the opportunity to speak with the CEO Shahaf Bar-Jeffen.

The team is on the verge of major developments, with the current priority being on V2 of the protocol, which is focused on providing a privacy-oriented Ethereum layer-two solution.

In the year With bold plans to launch its mainnet by the end of 2024, Bar-Jeffen talks about the significance behind the decision to go down this path, the fundamental challenges facing the industry and how COTI plans to address them.

COTI's main focus

In our most recent podcast episode, Shahef Bar-Geffen explained. More about He gave an important explanation about the recent progress of the project and also the roadmap in the near future.

For starters, the team's current focus is the launch of COTI V2, he said. Privacy-oriented Ethereum Layer-2 blockchain. But why privacy?

Bar-Jeffen identifies the ongoing challenges facing blockchain-based technology, but also for the internet in general.

“The best outcome of the Internet, and again, this isn't just for blockchain, and communication networks is going to be a decentralized network that keeps secrets, keeps your data private.

Well, this is it. Exactly What are we doing now with COTI? We're doing that on our existing network, so we're going to start really hard with liquidity and we're working on so true A unique technology that no one else has used.

And here it is important to clarify some important points. In light of recent events in which institutions around the world are cracking down on anonymity-first solutions, we asked Bar-Jeffen how COTI V2 stands out.

He explained that the team is working on a feature known as “selective disclosure”, whose main principal is “confidentiality rather than anonymity”. With this, users can decide exactly who they want to show their transaction details to. Opposing this to Monero, the CEO of COTI explained that the methodology is very different.

Transactions can remain confidential as long as users want to allow regulators to audit them if there is any doubt about their behavior, he explained.

This is fundamentally different from completely anonymous solutions where bad actors can transfer funds and perform various illegal activities such as money laundering, he said.

What is the tech stack that powers the COTI V2?

COTI is the first blockchain-based project to integrate a technology called garbled circuits.

Essentially, hashed cycles bring privacy on-chain, for example, by computing 1,000 times faster than other encryption systems such as fully holomorphic encryption (FHE).

Bar-Jeffen explained that the original purpose and structure was “not very useful for solving blockchain privacy due to performance issues.” But all that has changed.

We had a lot of researchers come from a company called Soda Labs, and we helped them do practical research on how to deploy this on blockchain. And they did.

But that's not all, Garbled's circular technology can handle transactions that touch the private realm shared between multiple parties, making it superior to ZK-based solutions.

According to the previous edition:

It is also free from the one-failure weaknesses described in TE solutions. The result is an on-chain privacy-preserving solution that is more scalable and secure than alternative solutions.

Road map for the coming months

He remembered Shahaf Bar-Gefe That's what he said. COTI introduced the concept of the V2 network earlier this year, after which Garbled circuits on the blockchain.

He also explained that the developer network has been launched recently and more than 400 smart contracts have been created. The network uses a technology called GC EVM (from Garbled Circuits), which is an extension to EVM, allowing developers to register a few new parameters in Solidity.

Basically, developers can write smart contracts in Solidity but decide which data should be kept private.

Moreover, COTI has recently completed building a testnet, which should be deployed in the next few months and should pave the way for the mainnet launch later this year.

“That should be very stable and lead us to the mainnet in Q4 of this year. So the idea is to have a privacy-focused Ethereum layer-2 mainnet.

Enabling easy KYC processes, focusing on AI-related initiatives and building DeFi solutions will be some of the key areas of focus for COTI in the coming months, the official added.

Check out the podcast above to learn more about what COTI is doing, as well as the ABC Growth Fund.