Cardinal Cryptography – a new way of safe data transferring

Aleph Zero is the key project of Cardinal Cryptography. It is a network for billing solutions addressed to various sectors, including financial, motoring or healthcare. In simple terms: the environment the company has developed is a decentralised database that offers more powerful mathematical security guarantees than legacy systems. Once any information finds its way to the network, it cannot be removed from there, which makes Aleph Zero fir banking systems and healthcare perfectly. Not unlike a conventional blockchain, Aleph Zero also offers the user full control over their data, and adds its proprietary “building blocks” – two innovations developed by the team of Polish scientists.

For a company, the use of such network means saved money but also, in specific situations, an increased level of security compared to external, centralised databases, which is achieved by the elimination of what is known as the single point of failure. Compared to other distributed networks, Aleph Zero offers a technology that has achieved the maximum theoretical security threshold. The innovation from the Kraków team has been reviewed by a team of scientists and published during the hosted ACM Advances in Financial Technologies 2019 Conference in Zurich.

“When it comes to implementation, we focus on a handful of selected sectors, as they are closest to our investors and our own network. We keep on learning how to talk about advantages and benefits for our institutional and corporate clients. To them, just blockchain is an exotic idea, not to mention a blockchain that is not among the world’s most popular. What we primarily focus on is the most advanced technology that we validate externally and subject to independent audits”, a co-founder of Cardinal Cryptography Antoni Żółciak says.

 

“The implementation of Aleph Zero was audited by Trail of Bits, a company consistently working with Google, Stripe, Adobe, DARPA, Microsoft, and the Linux Foundation”, he adds.

The innovative quality of the system

The Aleph Zero network is unique not only for its applications but also because it is a pioneering international project. The system developed by Cardinal Cryptography makes use of decades of distributed networks research.

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

“The first is a proprietary consensus protocol (the technique for negotiating the coherent and correct database version) which lets us offer a far greater speed while maintaining the optimum level of security while developing the blockchain. The other innovation is connected to privacy technologies based on Secure Multiparty Computation. It is a protocol that makes it possible to perform operations on encoded data from multiple users and disclose only the result of such operations. A good example of use of such a system is an election, in which individual votes remain private forever, while the result is disclosed after the electoral procedure has been completed.” Adam Gągol and Michał Świętek, cofounders of Cardinal Cryptography and the creators of the technology explain.

The first successes

Beginning with November 2020 the company has been part of the Kraków Technology Park’s Technology Incubator.

“We have received an actual support here: primarily, an option to enter cooperation with other companies being incubated. We were looking for a place whose IT and new-tech businesses environment would stimulate us to work. And this is where we found it.”

“What we consider our greater success is that our lineup hasn’t changed in spite of all the problems we had to face in 2020”, Antoni Żółciak adds.

The company can boast not only an innovative solution but also the significant financial support it received as part of the Aleph Zero project. In June 2021 the start-up announced its seed round of financing and received the total support of USD 4.9 million. Currently the company is working on closing the following round.

An international team

Cardinal Cryptography was incorporated by four experts from Poland and the US: Adam Gągol, Matthew Niemerg, Michał Świętek, and Antoni Żółciak. Each of the four manages a different aspect the company, and perfectly well complements the skillset of his teammates.

“The main concept for the technology was Adam’s idea, Michał covered with the first implementations, and I tried to create an environment around that technology, run marketing, and – together with Matthew – run fundraising and business development”, Antoni Żółciak explains the earliest days of the company. We also had that unbelievable luck to succeed in gathering a team with powerful internal motivations, plenty of patience for the founding team, and skills far above the average.”

Plans for the future

The first success is already here, but it is only the start on the development path.

“We believe that, for a start-up, a successful fundraising is only the start. As such, it is not a success but rather a preliminary market validation of the proof of our concept. True work is now ahead for us”, the team emphasise.

The company intends to implement its proprietary system in such fields as healthcare, energy management, and supply chain management. It intends to continue to increase employment and, most importantly, develop its operation globally.

If you’d like to learn more about how Cardinal Cryptography operates, please visit cardinals.cc

If you’d like to know more about Aleph Zero, why don’t you click alephzero.org