Private Data Objects: Off-Chain, Privacy-Preserving Smart Contracts

Private Data Objects (PDO) is a Hyperledger Labs research project for enabling mutually distrusting parties to perform computations over shared data efficiently and to coordinate their actions. PDO adopts the compute model of an off-chain smart contract, where the smart contract is executed within attested Trusted Execution Environments such as Intel SGX.

PDO uses blockchains as means to provide root of trust for the off-chain smart contracts, where the blockchain guarantees aspects such as integrity of smart contract identities, atomicity and auditability of transactional updates, etc. In this talk we will explain how PDO is beneficial for application developers seeking to define and implement privacy-preserving smart contacts, as well as for service providers seeking to provide blockchain services.

We will discuss use cases such as smart contracts for fair exchange of assets, NFT smart contracts for policy-based transfer of high value assets, secure smart contracts for digital wallets etc. Other aspects converted in the talk will include deployment details for both local test networks as well as for Azure confidential compute based attested networks, and our current roadmap for elevating PDO to a Hyperledger incubation project.

Speakers:
Mic Bowman
Prakash Narayana Moorthy