Integritee Achieves Feature-Complete Sidechains

Integritee completed a significant milestone today — feature-complete sidechains. This achievement paves the way to a future of unpermissioned access to trusted execution environments (TEEs) on Substrate blockchains such as Polkadot and Kusama via a fast, second-layer network.

Most blockchain networks tend to be transparent by nature, with transactions published on a public ledger. As a result, it can be challenging to incorporate data that is potentially sensitive or confidential into such networks.

Integritee addresses this issue by enabling Substrate-based blockchains to harness TEEs to process certain data confidentially. This enables potentially sensitive data (e.g. personally identifiable information) to be processed in a secure enclave without being revealed publicly.

When we first developed Integritee, in order to process incoming transactions and determine what order they should be executed in, every transaction needed to pass through the main blockchain, in a process known as indirect invocation. This requirement produced a bottleneck that affected the speed and potential scalability of the solution.

Thus, in order to make access to TEEs faster and more scalable, we developed a second-layer sidechain protocol that could provide consensus on the ordering of transactions without needing to interface with the main chain. Up until now, we had demonstrated sidechains where blocks could be accepted and validated by a single validator working alone. We have now progressed past this stage to facilitate sidechains with multiple validators.

The ability to support multiple validators is an important step. At a fundamental level, it makes access to TEEs more resilient and reliable. If an individual validator goes offline and is unavailable, others can step in to maintain connectivity for users. Furthermore, having a distributed network of validators is an essential prerequisite for the creation of decentralized, unpermissioned sidechains in future.

The development of Integritee sidechains now moves into the final phase — optimizing, stress-testing and benchmarking. This will involve testing the sidechains to see how many transactions per second (TPS) the system can handle and how fast transactions are confirmed. We will also detect, analyse, and circumvent any failure scenarios that may emerge. Once this phase is complete, we will publish a benchmark report with our findings. This will mark the end of the development process of Integritee sidechains, which will then be production-ready.

Have a look at our Demo.

To discover more about the Integritee network and how it uses blockchain to enable confidential processing of sensitive data at scale, visit integritee.network. To stay up to date about all the latest Integritee developments, news and partnerships, follow us on LinkedIn, Telegram or Twitter.