Blockchains were built to be censorship-resistant platforms. However, when looking at the state of the blockchain ecosystem today, it’s clear that blockchains are not as censorship resistant as they may first look, due to the ability for block proposers (both PoW miners and PoS validators) to censor transactions.
Furthermore, these block producers are able to frontrun or even “steal” my extraction for their own profit, leading to a problem known as Miner Extractable Value (or MEV for short). We are building a solution for this problem using a technique called Threshold Decryption, as a plugin to the Tendermint Core BFT consensus engine. With this plugin, users are able to submit encrypted transactions to the blockchain, which are only decrypted and executed after being commited to a block by a quorum of 2/3 validators.
By creating mempool level privacy, we will be able to solve the censorship and frontrunning problems that have long plagued blockchain systems.
As one of the largest validators on many Cosmos SDK-based stacks, the security, functionality, and future of the Cosmos SDK stack is extremely important to us. Having been part of the core development team of the stack for many years, we remain active contributors to the open source Cosmos SDK and Tendermint Core projects.
As one of the most active governance participants on the Cosmos Hub, we make many governance proposals for feature requests to improve the Cosmos Hub and Cosmos ecosystem. However, along with making proposals, we spec and implement our proposals, and then collaborate with other teams to include these new features into the Cosmos SDK and be activated on the Cosmos Hub.
Straightedge is a Cosmos SDK-based chain that supports the CosmWasm smart contracting language. It was conceived of by a group of Edgeware community members who were unhappy about certain practices in the initial distribution of the Edgeware token,
which are laid out here:
https://medium.com/straightedge/straightedge-distribution-faq-9298b8909932
Sikka helped coordinate the launch of the Straightedge chain by writing much of the initial codebase, the claim STR wallet (straighted.ge/claim), and organized the genesis validators. Now that the chain is launched, Sikka remains an active community member and validator.