Felix Xu

Felix Xu, crypto geek, early adopter, and NFT collector. Felix graduated from NYU Stern and founded two crypto projects, ARPA and Bella Protocol, among the global top 500 by market cap. Felix previously worked at Fosun Investment, Sackler family office, and Vertical Research in New York and Beijing. Felix loves sailing, kitesurfing and was featured in the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times for his NFT collection.

Felix is a veteran entrepreneur in blockchain and an NFT collector featured in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. Felix founded ARPA about 6 years ago and Bella Protocol 3 years ago. Both ARPA and Bella Protocol create cutting-edge crypto frameworks, received global awards and are backed by renowned investors. Previously, Felix worked as a venture investor at Fosun Group, and as a research analyst at Vertical Research and Summer Road. Felix graduated Cum Laude from the New York University Stern Business School for Finance and Information Systems.

Building ARPA Network

ARPA is a decentralized secure computation network built to improve blockchains' fairness, security & privacy. Leveraging advanced cryptography, ARPA introduces Randcast - a verifiable RNG that offers tamper-proof randomness for Autonomous Worlds, gaming, NFTs, etc.

Founded in April 2018, ARPA Network, originally known as ARPA Chain, embarked on its journey with a primary focus on enhancing privacy through multi-party computation (MPC). Despite the innovative approach, the complexity and performance limitations of MPC presented substantial hurdles in gaining market traction. Intrigued by the transformative possibilities of blockchain technology and the adaptability of cryptographic systems, the team at ARPA began to explore the synergistic potential of integrating MPC with blockchain technology. This exploration led to a strategic pivot towards the threshold signature scheme (TSS), seen as a key to addressing the inherent challenges of blockchain. This shift in focus and adoption of new technologies culminated in the rebranding to ARPA Network, signifying a renewed commitment as a permissionless computation network that utilizes threshold BLS signature schemes (TSS-BLS).

As Xu explains:

“Blockchain technology will inevitably become a part of our everyday lives as the adoption and use cases for digital assets increase, ARPA threshold BLS signature network can enable unique applications with better security at low cost. For example, our team is building Randcast, a verifiable RNG as the first application on top of ARPA, Randcast can improve the transparency of random seeds, and create value for metaverse gaming, lottery, NFT minting and whitelisting, key generation, and blockchain validator task distribution across multiple blockchains.”

According to a recent interview, Xu’s vision is as follows:

“I have always been a believer in freedom. Fascinated by Bitcoin and Ethereum’s vision, in early 2018, I decided to create a new blockchain protocol that focuses on data privacy.

From the very beginning, ARPA’s mission has been to separate data utility from ownership, thus enabling data renting. On this journey, our team has contributed to the development of Multi-Party Computation (MPC), which is arguably among the most cutting-edge cryptographic algorithms to date.

ARPA’s MPC protocol paves the way for multiple entities to collaboratively analyze data and extract synergies while keeping each party’s data input private and secure. Over the years, we helped set up the international standard of privacy-preserving computation, namely IEEE, and have raised substantial awareness of individual data privacy.

Moreover, we found that cryptographic algorithms can have many promising by-products, such as the verifiable random number generator. Now, we no longer limit ourselves to privacy, but explore the full spectrum of cryptographic applications in the blockchain.”