Introducing Anoma: A Blockchain for Private Asset-Agnostic Bartering
What is Anoma?
Anoma is a sovereign, proof-of-stake blockchain that enables private, asset-agnostic bartering among any number of parties. To illustrate the capabilities of Anoma, we’ll go through three examples and provide an overview of some of the key components of the protocol.
Private transfers with one asset type
In the first example, there are two participants: Alice, residing in San Francisco, and Bob, residing in Zürich. Alice and Bob had dinner together abroad, before they returned to their respective countries. To settle the bill for dinner, Alice wants to pay Bob in BTC.
In this example, two parties wish to transact, where the sender’s asset type (BTC) coincides with the receiver’s asset type. The Anoma blockchain is able to settle this transaction in zero-knowledge privacy. On Anoma, observers will not be able to infer any information about this transaction between Alice and Bob. Additionally, this transaction will look indistinguishable from any other transaction involving BTC, ETH, or any other cryptocurrencies.
Private transfers with two asset types
In the second example, Alice is on a business trip in Shanghai and visits 1984 Bookstore & Café, a trendy coffee shop in the bustling megacity. Alice, who holds primarily BTC in her mobile wallet, wants to pay for coffee.
Just like the first example, this transaction involves two parties: Alice and the coffee shop. However, the sender’s asset type (BTC) does not coincide with the recipient’s asset type, as the coffee shop only accepts CNY or CNYC, a stablecoin form of 人民币. Through Anoma, Alice can spend BTC and the coffee shop can receive CNYC.
Under the hood, the Anoma blockchain automatically facilitates exchange between BTC and CNYC at the best market rate at the time, and all intermediate transactions (sending BTC, the BTC/CNYC exchange, and receiving CNYC) benefit from privacy provided by a multi-denomination zero-knowledge transfer circuit, which enables different types of assets to share one anonymity set. This way, the privacy guarantees will not be limited by the transaction volume of each individual asset.
This transaction is enabled by Anoma’s custom-tailored state machine, which has an built-in trade system supporting cross-chain asset transfers and settlement, a novel account system based on validity predicates, and an intent matching system with liquidity incentivization.
N-party bartering
In the third example there are three parties: Alice, Bob, and Charlie. Alice holds BTC and wants DOT, Bob holds ETH and wants BTC, and Charlie holds DOT and wants ETH.
In this case, there are three parties, and no two can directly trade with each other because their desires are pairwise mismatched. The Anoma intent matching system and blockchain are able to match and settle the wants of all three participants at the same time. In other words, Anoma enables bartering among all three parties, as Alice, Bob, and Charlie do not need to agree on a common means of exchange in order to satisfy their individual wants.
Using the components described above, combined with custom zero-knowledge circuits, all interactions involved in an 𝐍-party barter can benefit from the same privacy guarantees as a simple two-party asset transfer. Moreover, users of Anoma can barter any types of assets, including cryptocurrencies, stablecoins, fungible-assets, non-fungible assets or any upcoming types that represent more complex valuables.
Lastly, the Anoma blockchain is equipped with a distributed key generation and threshold decryption scheme to prevent reordering transactions and front-running trades.
The motivations behind Anoma
The motivations behind Anoma are threefold: the loss of individual financial privacy, the loss of local financial sovereignty, and the inability of humankind to coordinate at scale.
First, the loss of financial privacy is fueled by the non-consensual usage of sensitive data about each individual’s financial activity by third parties. In mild cases, this results in intrusive commercial practices, such as targeted advertising or monetization of sensitive information. In more severe cases, this contributes to national and foreign governmental and corporate surveillance programs.
Second, the loss of local financial sovereignty results from the dependence on traditional financial systems — from electronic forms of fiat currencies to the permissioned backbone of international wire transfers. These systems, which often consist of a complex web of direct and indirect intermediaries, are susceptible to capture by governments, who can leverage them to enforce their sanctions on domestic or foreign residents.
Third, humankind lacks the tools to solve problems of a cross-border nature which require the coordination of large groups of distinct economic agents. An existentially threatening subset of them, collective action problems, are currently only addressable through mechanisms that rely on the intervention of governments. Unfortunately, said problems often transcend national borders, thereby rendering the enforcement capabilities of Westphalian nation states inadequate.
The vision behind Anoma
The Anoma blockchain protocol aims to facilitate “Self-Sovereign Communities” by providing tools that grant increased control to individuals and communities’ of the systems governing their day-to-day aspects and activities, such as financial privacy, sovereignty, and coordination.
As the first instances of the Anoma protocol focus on granting privacy-preserving financial tools, the Anoma blockchain protocol places special emphasis on supporting any kind of asset and on zero-knowledge privacy regardless of the denomination of the assets.
The purpose of undefining money refers to the removal of any artificial constraints around what can be used as money or means of exchange, providing higher flexibility and control to the users of the protocol in deciding what to use — be it assets created by others or assets they created themselves. Anoma’s focus on financial self-sovereignty is also illustrated by the N-party barter system, which facilitates asset-agnostic private cash in the simplest cases, but can assist in exchange, trades, and other financial activities of entire communities.
Finally, in alignment with the vision, the design of the Anoma blockchain protocol scales via fractal scaling. Simply put, each Anoma blockchain instance is designed to integrate seamlessly with other instances, which can be specialized geographically (e.g. when Alice pays for coffee in Shanghai, this transaction is settled by the Chinese instance of Anoma) or are tailored to satisfy the needs and purposes of any real-world or virtual community (e.g. an Anoma instance that allows Animal Crossing players to trade furniture).
The team building Anoma
The Anoma blockchain protocol is being built by Heliax, a team currently composed of 23 cross-disciplinary members and supported by the Anoma Foundation.
