Development and Advantages of HPB Anonymous Payment

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HPB-Foundation

6 min readDec 28, 2020

The Importance of Anonymous Payment

When it comes to anonymous payment, many people may think of Zcoin, Monero and other cryptos using anonymous payment technology. Although anonymous payment has a huge market, the delisting of these cryptos by a number of mainstream crypto exchanges has switched the market attitude towards negativity.

There was a thought that anonymous transactions were not a selling point worth special attention because it could be realized by techniques even without special anonymous cryptos.

The point above would be accepted by some people one year ago. But the cryptocurrency market never stops changing, yesterday’s ideas might be overturned today. Recently, with the rise of privacy-related projects such as Oasis and Findora, privacy protection and anonymous payment gradually return to the spotlight.

Although privacy protection and anonymous payment are different concepts, they are closely related. For example, as the most commonly used cryptocurrencies, the transfers require strong privacy protection, whether it is smart contract transfer or personal manual transfer.

Moreover, when building privacy computing projects using blockchains, data needs to be protected so that irrelevant people cannot obtain specific information. To conclude, anonymity is the basis of privacy protection and only when it is realized can various privacy Decentralized Applications (DApps) be built.

Privacy protection has been a hot topic in recent years. In the current Internet landscape, many programs need a large amount of data to improve the artificial intelligence algorithms to make them smarter and serve human beings.

But how to get so much data? This demand has made data acquisition an important industry and spawned a large number of websites and apps that illegally acquire and use personal data for calculations. This obviously invades personal data privacy.

In this case, privacy protection is particularly important. Similarly, in the transfer of cryptocurrencies, naturally there is strong demand for anonymous transactions.

Why is High Performance Blockchain (HPB) developing anonymous payment?

As discussed above, anonymous payment is a must-have in blockchain, thus many people may assume that a privacy coin is the cure. Actually, they fall into another misunderstanding, that is, they haven’t realized that anonymous payment is just one requirement for crypto transfers. Privacy computing does not solely work for anonymous payment.

For blockchain projects, if they wish to grow, privacy computing is definitely needed, while HPB has market and infrastructure advantages with it.

(1) There is a huge market and very few competitors right now.

According to the first-class warehouse, the current privacy protection market demand is huge, which can be seen from the aforementioned illegal acquirement of private data. And there are actually very few projects that have both privacy protection and smart contracts like HPB.

Take personal data acquisition as an example, there are two cases. The first is that some people are willing to sell part of their privacy like website browsing data for business uses but they still want their real names to be withheld. In this situation, blockchain technology can be used to protect personal privacy through complex smart contracts. If this case is processed well, there will be more trust from users who will feel more comfortable to share their personal data for business purposes. With privacy computing based on blockchain technology, we will see a more regulated big data market, where users can obtain rewards for sharing their personal data. Isn’t this beneficial for everyone?

The second situation is that some people want to protect privacy despite the inconvenience, so internet companies are definitely not allowed to collect their data.

As can be seen from the above situations, when developers build their own applications on the blockchain, there is a big market for privacy protection. HPB has seen this business opportunity and has begun to exert efforts in privacy computing and anonymous payment.

HPB has a wealth of talents for blockchain technology, which satisfies its development needs. On the eve of the outbreak of the privacy protection market, HPB will definitely seize this early advantage.

(2) HPB’s technical strength supporting its privacy computing ecosystem.

Traditional privacy coins are just cryptos, and they can not generate a blockchain ecosystem; while Decentralised Finance (DeFi) projects and DApps lack scalability, and are of little use for anonymous payment. Therefore, a blockchain with scalability is necessary for blockchain privacy protection.

HPB not only avoids the above problems, but also has its own advantages. HPB will not only support anonymous payment, but also has an in-built smart contract and DApp ecosystem. These features distinguish HPB from coins such as Zcoin and Monero which are purely privacy coins

In addition, there are two kinds of privacy technology. The first is zero-knowledge proof privacy technology based on program algorithms such as Zcoin, and the other is the hardware-based Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) such as that of Oasis. These two types of projects are still in the exploratory stage. The technical path is very important, because it will be difficult to adjust later when they have gone too far.

Meanwhile HPB avoids extremes and develops its own unique technology by combining software and hardware privacy advantages. HPB absorbs the benefits of privacy protection at the software level — upgradeability and high scalability, so that HPB can have more convenience for future maintenance and enable developers to adapt to various complex privacy protection requirements.

At the same time, HPB also absorbs the benefits of privacy protection at the hardware level by reducing complexity of the network. The more complex a system is, the more vulnerabilities it will have. And TEE of HPB can minimize the complexity of the system to make it run more smoothly and more efficiently.

At the software algorithm level, HPB focuses on the combination of hardware acceleration and zero-knowledge proof. It strives for the integration of zero-knowledge proof and smart contracts through hardware acceleration which is expected to play important roles in the development of related technologies, despite difficulties in implementing it.

In terms of hardware, HPB already has a wealth of Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) experience, and the successful development of its hardware acceleration engine actually shows that it has sufficient reserves of talents in hardware technology. Therefore, HPB is expected to rely on strong technical talents to combine TEE technology with hardware acceleration engine FPGA. This combination can enable a comprehensive network transformation without adding new hardware, making adding privacy function as simple as adding a module.

From this point of view, HPB’s combination of software and hardware is the best way, which is actually lacking in other privacy projects.

HPB is compatible with the latest version of EVM and will provide privacy protection for new DeFi applications.

HPB completed a mainnet upgrade on December 15, 2020. This upgrade allows HPB MainNet to support the latest version of Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), facilitating easy migration of many new applications designed for Ethereum to HPB MainNet.

Ethereum’s applications and smart contracts are generally written in Solidity. HPB now is compatible with Ethereum virtual machine, which allows developers to directly deploy and run the project source code. Many DApps written to run on Ethereum will also work fine on HPB MainNet.

At present, the privacy scheme on Ethereum is not mature. The DeFi program on Ethereum lacks privacy protection, so transaction data is public and checkable, making identity information easily exposed. This brings risks to wallet owners with large crypto holdings, because once their fund accounts are traced, all their transaction information can be read, and their funds can be targeted.

In response to this problem, the privacy computing of HPB can effectively protect the security of DeFi assets. This is why HPB’s support for anonymous transactions has great importance.

This article is contributed by 十万聪, translated and edited by Serina and Fay. Also thanks Gordon Glass for the English proofreading!

The article is written by the author independently, which does not necessarily represent the position of HPB Foundation.

For the original article written in Chinese, please visit: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/7hfgsQFekgncViCULYm4PA

About HPB

High Performance Blockchain (HPB) is a revolutionary permissionless blockchain architecture that combines HPB’s customized hardware Blockchain Offload Engine (BOE), with high-performance blockchain software, enabling unrivaled scalability.