ARPA’s Binance Community Voting Round & Growing Momentum Following President Xi’s Comments

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Julia Sakovich
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Photo: ARPA Official

ARPA – the layer two privacy-preserving computation protocol – is set to square off against Carry Protocol, a data purchase platform on Ethereum, in Binance’s second round of the Community Coin Vote (CCV). Voting will begin at 4 AM 5 November (UTC) and will incorporate Binance’s new rules for the CCV that allocates a BNB rewards pool to the runner-up and reduces the BNB holding period of 9 to 7 days. 

ARPA winning voters will split a rewards pool of 15 million ARPA tokens, while Carry voters will divide 50 million CRE should Carry win the vote.

The announcement of the voting event follows Binance’s recent push into underwriting several IEO projects and carefully screening new projects that it lists on its exchange. ARPA, which relies on standardizing an advanced cryptographic primitive called secure multi-party computation (sMPC), is the most recent high-profile protocol to feature in Binance’s CCV following its listing on Binance DEX earlier this summer. 

ARPA & Carry

The next Binance CCV event will pit two rising, and somewhat similar, protocols against each other. 

ARPA is a powerful layer two solution that deploys sMPC to construct a foundation for blockchain-based data sharing that can synergize data sets from multiple industries. 

“In the long term, we are targeting individual data management and secure monetization, but we are going to begin with enterprises who need secure data sharing across industries with a drop-in solution,” details ARPA CEO, Felix Xu. “ARPA is on the cutting-edge of MPC research, the most promising privacy-preserving data tech known in cryptography.” 

Indeed, the potential of converging data sharing with a fundamentally sound privacy tool in today’s digital climate of big data and harvesting of user data presents ARPA’s value proposition as compelling. The ARPA team has even launched a testnet on Ethereum already, compatible with MetaMask web wallets. 

The practical applications of sMPC have been heralded since its 1970s origins, but are only beginning to be intensively explored and realized by projects like ARPA. With so much hype around the underlying technology, it’s not surprising that ARPA has already aggregated over 70k supporters and helped establish a national standard for sMPC in China along with a slew of high-profile partners like Alibaba Cloud. 

On the other side of the Binance vote is Carry Protocol, a tool for user data control and monetization built on Ethereum. With more of a focus on offline consumer and advertiser users in the retail market, Carry has a smaller target audience than that of ARPA, which is looking to spin up a standardized infrastructure for data sharing in the modern era using sMPC. 

However, recent developments with ARPA encompass more than strictly its potential listing on Binance and extend further into mainstream crypto narratives with the comments by China’s President Xi Jinping about seizing the opportunity of blockchain technology reverberating throughout the industry.

ARPA’s Congruency with Chinese President Xi Jinping’s Recent Comments

President Xi’s comments not only coincided with one of Bitcoin’s largest upward price movements in its history but also shed light on the enigmatic leader’s ambitions for Chinese industrial innovation concerning blockchain technology. In a translated Medium post of his comments at the 18th Collective Study of The Political Bureau of The Central Committee, Xi detailed: 

“It is necessary to seize the opportunity of blockchain technology integration, function expansion, industry segmentation, and play the role of blockchain in promoting data sharing, optimizing business processes, reducing operating costs, improving synergy, and building a credit system. It is necessary to promote the deep integration of the blockchain and the real economy, and solve the problems of difficulty in financing loans for SMEs, difficulties in controlling the risks of banks, and difficulties in departmental supervision.”

His comments are on par with ARPA’s long-term vision of providing the medium for the synergy of data across industries and the private sector of the Chinese economy. ARPA’s ability to wield sMPC is congruent with many of the goals outlined by Xi, including facilitating a data-sharing model that can achieve:

“…joint maintenance and utilization of government data across departments and regions, promote business synergy, strengthen the digital governmental service provision, and bring better government service experience to the people.”

ARPA can subsequently become the conduit for helping establish a national standard for sMPC in China in collaboration with China Academy of Information and Communication Technology (CAICT), Ant Financial, Baidu, and Alibaba – all institutions with considerable influence, data purviews, and innovation runways in the Chinese economy. Eventually, ARPA envisions Xi’s comments translating into the galvanization of blockchain-oriented data solutions, which would further stir innovation in the blossoming field of sMPC. 

Binance’s announcement of the next CCV with ARPA should serve as additional exposure for the emerging sMPC project. Still, Xi Jinping’s comments are likely to produce the most significant outcome by crafting a government-supported framework to imbue Chinese industrial innovation with data-sharing technology extracted from blockchains.