Ika is a decentralized platform empowering Web3 builders to create protocols that operate natively across any blockchain with zero-trust security (eliminating the risk of trusted third parties that can be hacked or act maliciously). At the core of this architecture is the dWallet, a programmable and transferable zero-trust signing mechanism that ensures user consent is cryptographically enforced, allowing developers to build secure, decentralized applications that operate across the entire Web3 ecosystem.
The dWallet is an innovative Web3 building block that has the following attributes:
- Noncollusive: The user is always required to generate a signature.
- Massively decentralized: Beside the user, a 2/3 threshold of a network that can include hundreds of nodes, is also required to generate a signature.
- Multi-Chain: Using the default authentication method of blockchains - the signature - dWallets can offer universal and native multi-chain interoperability, without the cross-chain risks of wrapping, bridging or messaging.
- cryptographically secure: The security of dWallets is based on cryptography, instead of hardware or trust assumptions.
dWallets are the only way that exists today for Web3 builders to achieve secure, multi-chain interoperability, without compromising on the core Web3 values of user ownership and decentralization.
Builders on Sui Network can use dWallets natively and utilize Ika as a composable modular signature network, adding powerful multi-chain access control capabilities to their protocol.
dWallets utilize 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 zero-trust nature of dWallets, and the autonomy and flexibility of a permissionless Ika, the 2PC-MPC protocol also dramatically improves upon the state of the art, allowing Ika to be scalable & massively-decentralized.
The 2PC-MPC protocol achieves linear-scaling in communication - O(n) - and due to novel aggregation & 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 is a decentralized platform, that was 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. Changes that were made to Ika include disabling smart contracts, implementing 2PC-MPC, and using the communication in Sui's consensus Mysticeti for the MPC protocol between the nodes.
Ika is natively coordinated on Sui, and dWallets on Ika are controlled by DWalletCap objects on Sui.
Ika has a native token on Sui called IKA that is used (much like SUI) to pay for gas, and is also used as delegated stake on authorities within an epoch. 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 of the fees as rewards to users that delegated stakes to them.
Sui is based on a number of state-of-the-art peer-reviewed works and years of open source development that we are building upon with the Ika.
Use the following links to learn more about Ika and its ecosystem:
- Learn more about working with dWallets in the Ika Documentation.
- Find out more about the Ika community on the community page.
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 Ika technology upon this infrastructure.
We created a few Figma diagrams to help auditors make sense of our code:
Diagrams of the different dWallet MPC flows can be found here: https://www.figma.com/board/ISrirOSeSr9YyS6U4MTUyT/Flows-Diagrams?node-id=0-1&t=lZ0v3xQtJhWreFuf-1.
Diagrams of our State Sync mechanism can be found here: https://www.figma.com/board/uzpZ7ToOQ8DWcID2vOUlwt/State-Sync-Overview?node-id=0-1&t=fnWiOtTlWT7ZYV93-1.
![@dependabot[bot]](https://avatars.githubusercontent.com/in/29110?s=64&v=4){kind=small}
