Interview with CEO Shahaf Bar-Geffen

COTI is one of the veteran projects in the cryptocurrency field, and we had the chance to speak to Shahaf Bar-Geffen, the chief executive officer.

The team is on the brink of major developments, with the current priority being on the V2 of the protocol, focusing on delivering a privacy-centric Ethereum layer-two solution.

With bold plans of launching its mainnet by the end of 2024, Bar-Geffen also speaks on the merits behind the decision to go down this path, the fundamental challenges that the industry is facing, and how COTI is planning to tackle them.

COTI’s Main Focus

In our most recent podcast episode, Shahf Bar-Geffen explained more about the recent progress of the project and also shed important clarification regarding its roadmap for the near future.

Starting off, he said that the current focus of the team is the launch of COTI V2 – a privacy-centric Ethereum layer-2 blockchain. But why privacy? 

Bar-Geffen identifies the root of the ongoing challenges faced by blockchain-based technology, in general, but also for the Internet itself.

“The best outcome of the Internet, and again, this is not just for blockchain, and the communication networks will be a decentralized network that can keep secrets, that can keep your data private.

So, this is exactly what we are doing with COTI right now. We are doing that on top of an existing network, so we start very strong in terms of liquidity, and we are doing it in a very unique technology that no one has ever employed.”

And right here is where it’s critical to clarify some important points. In light of recent events in which institutions across the globe have been cracking down on anonymity-first solutions, we asked Bar-Geffen how COTI V2 is different.

He explained that the team is working on a feature known as “selective disclosure,” where the core principal is “confidentiality instead of anonymity.” Through that, users can decide whether they want to show their transaction details and to whom exactly. Opposing this to Monero, COTI’s CEO explained that the method is much different.

He explained that transactions can be confidential as long as users want them to be while still allowing regulators to audit them if there are doubts about their nature.

This is fundamentally different than entirely anonymous solutions where bad actors are able to transfer funds and conduct various illicit activities such as money laundering, he said.

What is the Tech Stack that Powers COTI V2?

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

In essence, garbled circuits bring on-chain privacy with a computation speed up to 1,000 times faster than other encryption systems, such as fully holomorphic encryption (FHE), for example.

Bar-Geffen explained that its original purpose and structure “wasn’t very useful to solve blockchain privacy because of performance issues.” But that all changed.

Along came a bunch of researchers from a company called Soda Labs, and we helped them fund practical research to how to actually employ this on blockchian. And they did it.

But that’s not all, Garbled Circuit technology can also handle transactions that affect a private state shared among multiple parties, potentially making it superior to ZK-based solutions.

According to a previous release:

It is also immune to single point of failure weaknesses that have been revealed in TEE solutions. The result is a privacy-protecting solution on-chain that is both scalable and more secure than alternative solutions.”

The Roadmap for the Following Months

Shahaf Bar-Geffen reminded that COTI introduced the concept for the V2 network earlier this year, followed by the garbled circuits on the blockchain.

He explained that the Developer Network also recently became operational and already has more than 400 smart contracts built on it. The network uses a technology called GC EVM (from Garbled Circuits), which is an expansion to EVMs, allowing developers to code in Solidity with a few new parameters. 

Essentially, developers are able to write smart contracts in Solidity but determine which data should be confidential. 

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

“That should be quite stable and will lead us to mainnet in Q4 this year. So the idea is to have the mainnet, which is a privacy-centric Ethereum layer-2.”

Enabling easier KYC procedures, focusing on AI-related initiatives, and building DeFi solutions will be some of the other key things of focus in the following months for COTI, the exec added.

To learn more about what else COTI is working on, as well as the ABC growth fund, check out the podcast above.