Q&A-HPB Anonymous Payment Program

Published in

HPB-Foundation

2 min readAug 19, 2021

Since the article HCash, the software and hardware integrated solution for anonymous payment publised last week, we received multiple questions concerning the Anonymous Payment Program to be supported in the upcoming MainNet release, thus prepared a short Q&A to clarify some of the questions as below.

Q1:Is this an HCash integration with HPB Wallet? https://www.h.cash

A1:HCash is to be integrated with HPB Wallet. We call our Anonymous Payment Program as Hcash inside the team. The specific branding name is to be finalized soon. Any existing project or cryptocurrency with the same HCash name has no relation with HPB at all.

Q2: Does it a) take advantage of HPB’s accelerators? Or b) are the FPGA chipsets within the node network operated by www.h.cash?

A2: a. yes, our Anonymous Payment Program takes advantage of HPB’s accelerators，specifically, the zero-knowledge protocol used in the Anonymous Payment Program takes advantage of HPB’s accelerator based on FPGA.

b. The hardware acceleration in the Anonymous Payment Program is supported by the BOE machine, but not any single node. And https://www.h.cash is not an HPB node.

Q3: Is HCash the cryptocurrency https://www.h.cash

A3: HCash cryptocurrency has nothing to do with our Anonymous Payment Program.

Q4: Is HCash the name HPB has given to its own autonomous payment solution inspired by Zether and integrated into HPB Wallet, helped by our node accelerators, which enables HPB to be moved anonymously via private wallet?

A4: We utilized the same zero-knowledge proof, range proof, as Zether. Based on this, we accelerate the zero-knowledge proof by using HPB hardware acceleration.

The anonymous payment program will be integrated with HPB Wallet, so users can exchange the privacy tokens with HPB. The exchange between privacy tokens will be kept anonymous. When you are done with the anonymous payment process, you are allowed to redeem HPB with those privacy tokens.

Summary

1. HCash is a name used internally by HPB’s tech team for the new anonymous payment program. This name may change. It has NO relation with any existing project or cryptocurrency with the same name.

2. The Anonymous Payment function takes advantage of the BOE accelerators within HPB’s node network to speed up the more complex Zero Knowledge Proof (ZKP) computation required for making a transaction private.

3. HPB’s HCash takes inspiration from the Zether (https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/191.pdf) private payment academic paper.

4. With HCash you will, within HPB Wallet, be able to swap to a privacy token before you make a transaction in order to keep that transaction anonymous. You can then swap back to HPB from the privacy token.

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.