Elixxir

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David Chaum (CEO/Founder) is a “pioneer of Internet anonymity”, considered the inventor of digital money. He holds a PhD in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, and has taught at prestigious schools such as the New York City Stern School of Business and the University of California. His career in cryptography and computer science began in 1981 when he wrote the paper "Opaque Email, Return Addresses, and Digital Aliases." This paper laid the foundation for anonymous communication systems and became a springboard for his research into anonymity.

Widely recognized as the inventor of digital money, David currently leads the Elixxir project to enable scalable digital sovereignty. He is also known for other fundamental innovations in cryptography, including privacy technologies and secure election systems. in computer science from the University of California at Berkeley, he taught at the New York Graduate School of Business and the University of California, led a number of breakthrough projects, and founded the International Association for Cryptological Research, a cryptography group at the Center for Mathematics and Computer Science. Computer Science) in Amsterdam, DigiCash, Voting Systems Institute and Perspectiva Fund (call themselves optical technology fund, specialize in venture investing.).

Jim Dolbear (President) - 99 contacts on LinkedIn, is a graduate of Harvard and Yale School of Management. From July 2017 to the present, he has been the president of Elixxir, since July 2007 Co-Founder and Partner Perspectiva Fund. Worked in project finance and mergers and acquisitions at New York investment banks Lehman Brothers and Morgan Stanley. He later joined Avery Dennison Corporation, where he worked in Finance and Cost Accounting before leading World Class Manufacturing. For six years he worked as Just-in Time project manager, production manager, safety manager and quality manager. Jim then became a 100% commission salesperson at Boston Management Recruiters International. He then headed a 20-person search and consulting firm, the Larkin group focused on the then new media and Internet industries. He founded the Digital Coast Roundtable and also ran LAWNMOWER, an exhibition and publishing company that hosted events in Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco. His clients have included Sun Microsystems, IAC, Microsoft, Activision, Harcourt Brace, Cisco, Exodus, Warner Brothers and Fox Internet Group. Jim met David Schaum in 2000, and they worked with the USC Information Science Institute to create the Voting Systems Institute. He has also served as a technology advisor to the State of California and sat on the Advisory Board of the USC Center for Integrated Media Servers, an NSF research center.

William Carter (Chief Operating Officer & Chief Product Officer) - 203 contacts on LinkedIn, has been working at elixxir since August 2017, and since 2015 has been the founder and co-founder of companies such as trecento and expanse, respectively. These are two projects in which the aforementioned Perspectiva Found has invested.

Stephanie Vaughan(Chief Financial Officer) - 500+ contacts on Linkedin, has been working at Elixxir since 2018. From October 2017 to May 2018, she was Director and Founder at Block Next Ventures, a company that helps with ico projects. He holds an MBA in finance from Columbia Business School and a BA in quantitative economics from the United States Naval Academy. A former captain in the United States Marine Corps, she served as a communications and operations officer and held strategic roles helping to redesign the USMC Force and overseeing counterterrorism efforts for U.S. Central Command in Afghanistan. She served as Director of Capital Markets and Development at StreetShares, where she led all strategic initiatives for investor products. She also played a key role in raising $23 million in Series B funding. USA. Previously, she was a senior associate in venture debt for LunaCap Ventures and was an associate investment partner at Houlihan Lokey.

Amanda Cavaleri (Chief Marketing Officer & VP Business Development) - 500+ connections on Linkedin, since August 2018, is a technologist and entrepreneur serving as Chief Marketing Officer and VP of Business Development in Elixxir. She has worked on consumer-facing technologies ranging from machine learning and VOIP technologies to smart home and emerging technologies (AR/VR) over the past decade. She acts as a consultant in relations with companies and investors. She was a partner in corporate strategy and innovation in 2016-2017. With AARP, where she worked to address multi-generational skills shortages in the workforce. She has consulted with consumer electronics companies, real estate developers and family offices. She has also been involved in academic development as a thought leader and advisor to Carnegie Mellon University and the UPMC Quality of Life Technology Center and an innovation and business partner with the University of Denver at the Knobel Institute for Healthy Aging. Amanda's work has been featured on the TEDx stage, The Denver Post, and the PBS NewsHour.

Mario Costa is a cryptographer. He specializes in privacy and analysis of cryptographic protocols. He was part of the UMBC Cyber ​​Research Lab and participated in the study and development of a state-of-the-art private user discovery protocol.

The remaining members of the team do not arouse much interest, some are not on Linkedin, and for others it is completely empty.

Technology and idea

So, what kind of drink is Elixxir?

We have at our disposal a 20-page brief that gives a general idea of ​​the project idea exclusively from the technological side. In fact, the document lists and briefly describes the basic principles, without any mathematical or economic justification. True, there are links to 13 scientific works created incl. and David Chaum (project ideologist). Without being able to verify the evidence of the theses put forward, we can only list them even more briefly.

Elixir is a blockchain platform for digital payments and messaging, which aims to facilitate the mass adoption of blockchains and digital currencies as much as possible, focusing on solving three key tasks:

• Speed (payments and message transfer must be carried out in seconds, the ability to carry out tens of thousands of TPS is confirmed).
• Transaction security (only the sender and recipient of the transaction can view it and verify its authenticity, the content of the transaction is not stored in the blockchain network).
• Communication privacy (it is in no way possible to identify participants and their devices).

Main technological features of the platform:

1. Mixing. A way to “confuse the tracks” at the routing protocol level and make it impossible to identify connections between supplier - recipient - transaction contents. This approach today is not something unique in the field of anonymization of cryptocurrencies, but David Chaum is one of its main ideologists (the first publications about Mix Networks were made back in 1979, while his developments in this area were used long before the blockchain, for example in Tor ). The document talks about the use of the cMix protocol, which has its own unique features, which we will not dive into the analysis of.
2. A new ideology of fixing property rights. Traditional blockchain operates with wallets protected by the owner’s electronic signature. Blocks on the network record transactions between wallets. Elixxir assumes that ownership will be determined at the individual coin level, i.e. Each coin will be cryptographically protected by a hash function. Attention: we are talking about a simple hash function, and not about a digital signature system: in our case, the owner of the coin stores (outside the network) a certain secret record, while the “address” of this coin on the network is the result of the hash function above the secret entry. In this case, the transaction algorithm in Elixxir can be represented as follows: the recipient generates a new coin address (there is no coin there yet) and sends it to the sender; then the sender sends a request to the network to process the transaction, which includes this new address and a secret record about the coin that he owns and wants to send; then the network (validators) checks the owner’s rights and rewrites the coin address from the old owner to the new one (the old address is destroyed), sending the necessary confirmation to the participants. Thus, in one block of the network, not complete information about the transaction (sender-recipient-amount) is recorded, but an arbitrary list of addresses of coins that are created and that are destroyed (the lists are equal in length).  It becomes impossible to identify the real participants in a transaction even based on an analysis of all the blocks of the network. In addition, a brute force attack can only compromise an individual coin, and not all of the owner’s assets. Finally, according to the authors of the document, such a scheme is more resistant to attacks using quantum computers.
3. Elixxir consensus mechanism. To calculate a new block, the network dynamically generates a temporary team (5-30 nodes) responsible for processing of this block. A network with a defined horizon defines a queue of commands with a corresponding list of transactions that must go into the blocks to which the commands are assigned. After completing work on a block, the team gives priority to the results of the calculated block to the next team in line and only after that distributes them to all other network participants. To obtain the right for a node to be included in a particular team, a guarantee fee (stake) is required, and other network participants must vote for it (advanced voting technologies are used). The time a team can work on a block is limited and, if there is no timely result, the block is transferred to the next team in line (thereby achieving network fault tolerance). It is claimed that this consensus mechanism is much more resistant to 51% attacks (the presence of at least one “respectable” node in the team is enough) and Sybil attacks.
4. Pre-computations. The main tool for achieving high network performance . According to David Chaum, one of the most resource-intensive operations on the blockchain is the generation and verification of an electronic signature. Since the Elixxir network (and its cMix protocol) use electronic signature technology (for the operation of Mixing mechanisms), it is proposed that all operations necessary for this are performed by command nodes before they receive the results from the previous command (previous block), i.e. before the signal “start” of final validation. In other words, knowing the composition of the transactions included in the block for which a specific team is responsible, its members (nodes) make the necessary calculations related to electronic signatures in advance, and also agree on the order of processing transactions in the block. It is important that at this stage the nodes do not analyze the actual content of the transactions. These calculations, as a rule, take up to 80% of the time of the total work on the block. And only after receiving the start command from the previous command, the analysis of the contents and verification of the authenticity of ownership of assets in the list of processed transactions begins (hash functions are performed on the secrets of specific coins). Thus, we can talk about a certain parallelism in block processing, which leads to a noticeable increase in the overall efficiency of the system. If we use the terms of the document, then at the first stage the team members form a processing template, according to which the final calculations are carried out in real time.

Preliminary conclusions

This document can be considered as preliminary, in which many points are only voiced, but not revealed deeply. The project was announced relatively recently and at the time of writing this review its information field was very limited (there is practically no “substantive” information in the existing media environment - twitter, telegram, discord, etc.). Obviously, over time, a significant number of questions will be answered (for example, more details will become known regarding the mechanism of preliminary calculations, or the security of transmitting secret records to the network when sending payments, or the possibility of carrying out transactions with fractional amounts of coins, etc.). An additional point, not reflected in any way in the document, is the question of the possibility of implementing smart contracts/dApps (without them it is pointless to talk about a modern blockchain).

So, it is too early to draw any fundamental conclusions based on the presented document. The proposed ideas deserve both close attention from the community (if only because of the authority of David Chaum) and extensive discussion by the community.

The project is controversial, a very strong CEO, who is one of the key figures in cryptography - on the one hand, on the other hand - there is not enough information on the technical part and its implementation. But what can be said for sure is that the team is gaining hype by leaps and bounds.