Cardinal Cryptography – a new approach to secure data transfer

Cardinal Cryptography is a cryptography and blockchain company founded in 2019. Its main product, Aleph Zero, introduces fundamental innovations to the industry. The platform developed by Cardinal Cryptography solves a number of problems that plague blockchain technology, including: scalability, security, and decentralization. 

The key project of Cardinal Cryptography is Aleph Zero. This is a network on which solutions can be built for various industries: financial, automotive, or healthcare. To put it simply, the environment created by the company is a database that is decentralized and characterized by greater mathematical guarantees of security than the systems known so far. Once any information is placed in the network, it can no longer be removed from there, which makes Aleph Zero excellent for use in banking systems or in healthcare. Similarly as in the case of a conventional blockchain, Aleph Zero also provides users with full control over their data, but at the same time adds its own “building blocks” in the form of two innovations developed by a team of Polish scientists.

The use of this type of network means saving money for a company, but also, in specific situations, an increase in the level of security compared to internal, centralized databases, which is achieved by removing the so-called single point of failure. In turn, when compared with other distributed networks, Aleph Zero has to offer a technology that has reached the maximum theoretical threshold of security. The innovation of the Kraków team was peer-reviewed by a team of scientists and published during the hosted ACM Advances in Financial Technologies 2019 conference in Zurich.

“From the implementation side, we focus on a few selected industries, because our investors and our own network are closest to them. We are constantly learning how to talk about the benefits for institutional or corporate clients. Often, blockchain itself is an exotic idea to them, let alone a blockchain that is not in the global lead in terms of popularity. We focus primarily on the most advanced technology possible, which we validate externally and subject to independent audits,” says Antoni Żółciak, co-founder of Cardinal Cryptography.

“The audit of the Aleph Zero implementation was performed by Trail of Bits, a company that works on a daily basis with Google, Stripe, Adobe, DARPA, Microsoft, and the Linux Foundation,” he adds.

System innovation

The Aleph Zero network is unique not only due to its application, but also because it is a pioneering, international project. The system developed by the Cardinal Cryptography team utilizes decades of research on distributed networks.

“It is a system based on two innovative concepts created by scientists from the Jagiellonian University,” says Antoni Żółciak.

“The first concerns a proprietary consensus protocol (a technique for agreeing on a consistent and correct version of a database between multiple servers), thanks to which we are able to offer significantly higher speed while maintaining an optimal level of security during the creation of the blockchain. The second innovation is related to privacy technologies built on the basis of so-called Secure Multiparty Computation. This is a protocol that allows calculations to be performed on encrypted data from multiple users and reveals only the result of such calculations – an example application could be elections, in which individual votes remain private forever, while the result is revealed after the completion of the election procedure,” explain Adam Gągol and Michał Świętek, co-founders of Cardinal Cryptography and creators of the technology.

First successes

Since November 2020, the company has been a part of the Technology Incubator of the Krakow Technology Park.

“We actually received support here, and above all, the opportunity to establish cooperation with other incubated companies. We were looking for a place where the environment of companies from the IT and new technologies sector would drive us to work. We found that here.”

“We consider our greatest success to be that despite the problems we had to face in 2020, we are still together in the same team,” adds Antoni Żółciak.

The company can boast not only an innovative solution but also substantial financial support, which it received as part of the Aleph Zero project. In June 2021, the startup announced a seed funding round, securing total support of USD 4.9 million. Currently, the team is working on closing the next round, the result of which will be announced in the autumn of this year.

International team

The founders of Cardinal Cryptography are four experts who come from Poland and the United States: Adam Gągol, Matthew Niemerg, Michał Świętek, and Antoni Żółciak. Each of them handles a different aspect of running the company and perfectly complements the competencies of their colleagues.

“The main concept for creating the technology came from Adam, Michał took care of the first implementations, and I tried to build the environment around this technology, handle marketing, and, together with Matthew, manage fundraising and business development,” recalls Antoni Żółciak about the beginnings. “We were also incredibly lucky to gather a team with immense intrinsic motivation, a great deal of patience for the founding team, and skills that go far beyond average.”

Plans for the future

The first successes are behind them, but this is only the beginning of the development road.

“We believe that successful fundraising is only the beginning for a startup. This fact alone does not constitute success, but only an initial market validation of our concept. The real work is still ahead of us,” emphasizes the team.

The company plans to implement its proprietary system in fields such as healthcare, energy management, or supply chain management. It plans to consistently increase employment and, most importantly, develop its activities globally.

If you want to learn more about the activities of Cardinal Cryptography, please visit the website: cardinals.cc

If you want to learn more about Aleph Zero, take a look at: alephzero.org