encryptogroup/MOTION

MOTION is a sophisticated academic-grade framework originating from the ENCRYPT group at TU Darmstadt. While its 92 stars and 0.0/hr velocity suggest it has moved into a maintenance or 'finished' state, the high fork-to-star ratio (nearly 50%) indicates significant reuse in research and downstream cryptographic applications. Its primary moat is the implementation of 'mixed-protocol' switching—allowing a developer to toggle between Boolean and Arithmetic secret sharing (e.g., using Yao’s for some parts of a circuit and GMW for others) to optimize performance. This is a non-trivial engineering feat that provides a significant barrier to entry. Compared to newer projects like Google's 'Fully Homomorphic Encryption' libraries or OpenMined's PySyft, MOTION is lower-level and focused on raw MPC throughput. It competes with other heavyweight frameworks like MP-SPDZ and SCALE-MAMBA. The defensibility is capped at 6 because, despite the deep technical moat, the project lacks the commercial ecosystem and active maintenance required to ward off newer, more user-friendly rust-based or python-wrapped MPC libraries in the long term. Frontier labs (OpenAI/Anthropic) are unlikely to build this directly, as they favor TEEs or Differential Privacy for scale, making the frontier risk low.