Saline Network: Serving Institutional Clients

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It is a common perception that successful blockchain projects that are designed to operate at scale must primarily target a retail audience (or “crypto degens”) to succeed and gain traction (even for more sophisticated players to participate). Our mission is to make cryptocurrency more accessible and user-friendly for everyone, including institutional users. Our team's background in traditional finance and crypto custodial services gives us a unique insight into the needs and challenges faced by all profiles.

A major frustration for institutions in the crypto space (whether entirely crypto-focused or exploring crypto use cases as a smaller part of the business) is “signing fatigue” – the repetitive need to authorise each transaction manually. That process will often involve friction between convenience and secure operations (e.g. wallet control and security). Saline addresses this by introducing a system where users can set up rules or “intents”. Once these intents are established, they allow for transactions to proceed automatically, provided they meet the predefined rules. This leads to what we call “signatureless transactions”. In our inaugural blog post, we detailed how Saline facilitates these transactions, simplifying the process significantly, and we have provided more detail about those intents in this follow-up post.

Through discussions with our institutional clients, we've identified 3 key factors that make them interested in Saline network: ease of use, cost-effectiveness for large-scale transactions, and reliability. Saline stands out by offering a straightforward interface and SDK (Software Development Kit), competitive pricing, and a trustless platform—ensuring transactions are secure and verifiable without needing a central authority.

Below, we explore some reasons why we believe the Saline Network is poised to be a catalyst for widespread institutional adoption.

MPC Signature

MPC wallets and technology have been around for a long time (in crypto years) and have been increasingly widely adopted, especially among institutions users.

Hold on, what's an MPC signature anyway?

Imagine a scenario where a group of chefs, each holding a unique ingredient, want to cook a special recipe together. No single chef knows the full recipe, but together they can complete it. This situation mirrors the concept of Multi-Party Computation (MPC) in the following ways:

Shared Secret (The Recipe): In MPC, the "secret" (like a private key) is split into parts, with each party holding a piece. Similarly, in our analogy, the complete recipe (the secret) is unknown to the individual chefs, but each of them holds a part of it (an ingredient).
Collaborative Process (Cooking Together): Just as our chefs must work together to combine their ingredients to complete the dish, in MPC, the parties collaboratively compute the function (e.g., creating a digital signature) without revealing their individual parts of the secret to others.
Privacy Preservation (Secret Ingredients): Each chef's ingredient is kept secret, similarly to how each party's piece of the key in MPC is private. They can add their ingredient to the pot without letting others know exactly what it is, preserving the secrecy of their contribution.
Trust and Security (Quality of the Meal): The quality of the final dish depends on each chef correctly contributing their ingredient. In MPC, the security and validity of the computed result depends on each party correctly performing their part of the computation, even if some of them might be untrustworthy or compromised.

In the institutional world, MPC acts like a sophisticated signing policy: for example, requiring two out of three signatures to release funds from a wallet. It’s secure, private, and decentralized.

Now, how does this blend with Saline’s Intent?

Intent Signature Rule Creation: Institutions can whip up an intent on Saline, using our tools, to set rules for transactions, like needing a signature for funds to move from Wallet X to Wallet Y. They decide on the signature type (like MPC or multisig) and the algorithm flavour (Lindell, Dorerner, etc.
Transaction Validation: A validator confirms that the transaction obeys the Intent rule of the wallet and adds the transaction to the block. Voilà!
Intent Transaction Creation: Create an intent for a transaction to transfer 1000 USDC from X to Y + MPC Signature
MPC service: This step calls in your MPC service (eg. Qredo, Fireblocks etc..) to gather the necessary signatures based on the rule you set, in this case 2 out 3 signatures are required. The MPC service provider will then generate an aggregate signature when 2 out of 3 signatures has been reached.
Intent submission: Aggregated signature then gets inserted as part of the Intent and submitted through our SDK to Saline Network. Once submitted, the intent gets posted on chain and matcher facilitates the transaction on saline network.

Our intents are designed to be a buffet of possibilities, accommodating various elements like data oracles, MPC, and more.

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Cross-chain trustless settlement

One of the big pain points of DeFi is when it comes to settling a big trade, especially a trade done over-the-counter, between parties not wishing to trust each other and who do not want to use a central exchange.

The typical go-to way is for them both to trust an external, (hopefully) neutral third-party to act as an escrow agent.

Those third parties bear responsibility in case something goes wrong (though many will attempt to limit it), and must then lock a large amount of collateral.

From our discussion with a clearing house, we have designed an automated, atomic and cross-chain escrow wallet service, precisely to solve this issue: Settlr, which will soon rely on the Saline platform to operate. With Settlr, parties can automatically settle trades without having to trust anyone, it doesn't matter who pays first or if a party suddenly backs out in the middle of the deal

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What does this look like in practice?

Let's say party A wants to settle 10 BTC for 180 ETH with party B. With Saline’s intent system, it is simple:

“If there is 10 BTC balance in Escrow A and 180 eth balance in escrow B in the next 2 hours, send 10 BTC to wallet B and 180 ETH to wallet A, else refund both”

This system not only ensures fairness but also opens doors to more assets and chains as our network grows. No more reliance on central parties or exchanges for settlements; Settlr offers a low-cost, reliable and trustless solution.

Expanding into the Venture Capital and ICO Markets

Consider the implementation of an Initial Coin Offering (ICO). Traditionally, options might include utilising a centralised service, a liquidity bootstrapping pool, or simply publicising a wallet address on platform X with instructions to transfer SOL to this address in exchange for the specified cryptocurrency. However, the outcomes of such strategies can be problematic, as illustrated by the case detailed in this report.

Settlr changes the game. ICO participants can send their USDC, SOL, ETH, BTC (or whatever) to be held in escrow, and only if the issuer also sends their ICO token will settlement occur, otherwise the deposit transactions are reversed. So there is no need to trust a middleman or send assets to the void, hoping to get your promised ICO token.

While still in its testnet phase, the potential for Settlr on the mainnet is thrilling. We aim to integrate it seamlessly into our intent UI, part of our broader Saline wallet service, making it incredibly user-friendly with no counter-party risk. Plus, we’re planning to enable settlement sharing via platforms like Telegram to streamline the process.

This is just a glimpse of Settlr's potential. The impact of this one application is monumental!

To get a closer look or participate in our beta, please DM us on X @salinenetwork

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