The Key to FROST: What is Distributed Key Generation?
The post The Key to FROST: What is Distributed Key Generation? appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.
Multisig is a familiar concept for most in Bitcoin: a multisig transaction requires approval from multiple parties before it can be executed. We distinguish between “n-of-n” multi-signatures, where the number of involved parties is n, and they all need to approve, and “t-of-n” threshold signatures, where only a smaller number t of participants need to approve. Cryptographic schemes like MuSig, MuSig-DN and MuSig2 for multi-signatures and FROST by Komlo and Goldberg for threshold signatures can reduce transaction cost and improve privacy of multisig wallets. So far, in the Bitcoin Community FROST has only been used in experimental implementations. In this post, we explain why this is the case and how we aim to advance FROST in a Bitcoin production environment through our recent publication of a BIP draft for the ChillDKG distributed key generation protocol. First, what are the benefits of FROST? Privacy and Efficiency Gains with MuSig2 and FROST With MuSig2 and FROST, even though multiple participants contribute to the signing process, the outcome is a single signature. This not only gives better privacy to the participants by making the transaction look like as ordinary singlesig-wallet transaction. It also trims down the transaction, reducing its size and therefore lowering the transaction fee. All great things! MuSig2 and FROST allow Bitcoin users to operate a multisig wallet with the same transaction cost as a regular single-signature wallet. The cost benefits are especially significant for systems with a large number of signers and frequent transactions, such as federated sidechains like Liquid or Fedimint. Unlike traditional multisig, which leaves a distinct fingerprint that allows blockchain observers to identify transactions of the wallet, FROST-based wallets are indistinguishable from regular single-signature wallets on the blockchain. Therefore, they provide an improvement in privacy compared to traditional multisig wallets. While MuSig2 has seen adoption from the…
Filed under: News - @ August 3, 2024 10:26 am