What You Need to Know About the Zero Protocol (zPHR) and Its Upgrade Through the Synapse Sharding Architecture to Address Vulnerability
Among the very many features, the Phore team has surrounded the Phore Blockchain with a high level of built-in security, this is to ensure that all transactions made by users are safe. Some of the security issues Phore actually tries to tackle are the already existing problems in Bitcoin; being the pioneering digital currency it is expected that are some grey areas that could be further worked upon to enhance its usability are almost unavoidable.
For Bitcoin, transactions are being recorded on the ledger, with all the details pertaining to that transaction such as the sender’s address, the receivers address, amount sent and even the transaction fee, visible for all to see. Although this feature helps to keep an accurate balance of transactions and prevent double-spending of coins, it also happens to reveal too much information about the sender and receiver of the transaction. This is because the analytics of these blockchain data in some cases can be used which address belongs to which wallet by using pieces of information which can be analyzed for patterns or other data. Data such as deposits from multiple addresses to a particular deposit address at an exchange, transactions which were recorded with their IP addresses associated with them. The association of all these addresses when traces could reveal the identity of the owners.
All about the Zero Protocol (zPHR)
Zero protocol happens to be a customization of Phore Blockchain also known as zPHR which serve the purpose of keeping transactions private, this system was designed to be of importance to persons who would not like to have their transactions stored in any public ledger, given that every individual may want at least some of there transactions private.
The zPHR is a coin shuffling technology that converts (“mints”) PHR into zPHR by way of mixing them after which it adds the person’s PHR to an accumulator pool of zPHR on the blockchain, this would further anonymise the transaction and make it impossible to trace. A system had also been created where Zero-knowledge proofs are used between the user and a Phore Blockchain masternode to verify transactions, without having the need to expose the link between the sender and the receiver on the blockchain.
The RSA-2048 encryption challenge keys are designed to create an interaction platform between users and the masternodes, during transactions; this eliminates the need for a developer-trusted set up in order to achieve this. This means that no one can have access to sufficient information that would have people’s identities revealed due to the anonymization the zPHR protocol has provided.
PHR holders could use their Phore Blockchain wallet to mint their PHR into zPHR coins, for a small transaction fee (0.01 PHR per minted zPHR coin), in various standardized denominations ranging from 1 to 5,000 PHR. Minting zPHR is also necessary because it requires some computationally intensive action and therefore needs a mechanism to prevent spam/freeriding from overwhelming the Phore Blockchain network.
So how does the new synapse Architecture come into the picture?
As proof that the Dev team of Phore Blockchain are constantly looking for ways to deliver value, there has been an update to the zPHR protocol.
According to the recent updates from the team zPHR would be built on top of sharding which provides a lot more flexibility and security, but seeing that there were fundamental problems which have been discovered with Zerocoin, so we’d probably opt to use a different protocol.
In an interview of Phore’s CEO Mike Trisko by The Daily Chain, he said that the Zerocoin vulnerability has great potential of being a threat to privacy coins, however, he further stated that Phore was not at risk to this vulnerability due to its new Synapse architecture.
There is support for Zero coin privacy transactions included in the current Phore Architecture, users were protected as the Zerocoin vulnerable features were immediately disabled; in any case, the Phore exposed wasn’t much as not many held zPHR.
The Zerocoin features would be created on the Synapse Architecture as it was built from scratch. Customized shard types are allowed on the new Architecture for specific use cases and might make use of one or more proven privacy protocols. He also added that:
“Phore’s vision is much more than just privacy–we do highly value privacy, and we will be looking to enable ways for people to maintain their privacy while using the Phore blockchain and applications in many ways.”
For more information about Phore Blockchain, the following links are at your disposal.
