Amnesia Cash
The zero-knowledge, non-custodial privacy mixer for the IOTA network.
By design, distributed ledgers are open and transparent about all their transactions and interactions. Through full-nodes and explorers, everyone has access to the full history of all funds. This is one of the main features of distributed ledgers, but comes with a downside. Once someone knows you own a particular address, and with a little bit of know-how, they can make a good estimation of your payment history and estimate your holdings.
I hear you thinking ‘I have nothing to hide!’, and for most of us this probably holds true most of the time. But ‘nothing to hide’, is a world apart from ‘for everyone to see’.
And for that I want to quote the first line of the Cyberpunk manifesto:
Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age. Privacy is not secrecy. A private matter is something one doesn’t want the whole world to know, but a secret matter is something one doesn’t want anybody to know. Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world.
Towards a solution
The default for distributed ledgers is non-private and full transparency. Privacy quickly became a concern and within different crypto ecosystems, different paths were taken to make crypto payments private, the obvious ones are Zcash and Monero as layer one full privacy coins.
Besides these layer one solutions, mixers are a very popular choice. Bitcoin, Ethereum and other popular chains were quick to develop mixers, albeit mostly centralized. Later coinjoin protocols arose that did a great job of increasing privacy.
This was all before Tornado Cash set the stage for a new mixer protocol based on zero-knowledge proofs. That allowed for full on-chain privacy of funds on prior non-private ledgers. And it does this -without- any centralized components.
Amnesia Cash is an adaption of Tornado Cash, but adapted to uniquely suit the unique assets and features of the IOTA ledger.
Amnesia within the IOTA Ecosystem
Would you want the waiter in your restaurant, at the moment you pay, to know your approximate holdings? Or more relevant in the current environment, have an NFT you want to show-off to only dox your own token position? The relative ease this can be achieved will lead to great direct personal security issues. Things that were ‘private’ before are now all of sudden completely public, just by the use of an app. Privacy is about personal security.
And we believe IOTA should not be excluded from that. In that spirit, Amnesia aims to be a large driver for privacy first applications within the ecosystem, beyond just the mixer.
But IOTA doesn’t support contracts yet?
Amnesia Cash, as of writing this article, is still in development, as is the platform it will run on. However all zero-knowledge related work has been done and works in contracts executed on ISCP (evm chain). The front-end works but needs to be styled. Then it is waiting for shimmer/stardust to release for a public beta and when mainnet is live we aim to be one of the first fully decentralized unstoppable applications to on the IOTA mainnet!
All of the Amnesia Cash work will be open sourced.
To stay up to date follow us on:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/amnesia_cash
Discord: https://discord.gg/rskpfmEKEU
