[2024] Latest Updates
Navigators!
Time to round up the latest developments.
Let’s start with the big one: the new Navio website.
As previously stated, this was a true community effort that deserves a huge pat on the back. The collaboration took place in our Discord channel, transparently and with time, skill and input from dedicated community members. Thank you to everyone involved, congratulations and gratitude.
The site comes with a fresh look, a clear message, and a clean structure that emphasizes what matters most. The excess fat was trimmed and the focus kept on what Navio stands for: an open-source, community-driven, decentralized privacy project. It highlights the Navio Proof-of-Private-Stake system, the innovation of private staking, and the exciting real-world use cases ahead.
Development-wise, the pull request to enable a SWIG wrapper for libblsct, making it easier to integrate Navio’s cryptographic features across various languages and tools, has been created and merged. The latest Bulltetproofs++ and private tokens/NFTs pull request has also been successfully merged. Bulletproofs++ reduces transaction sizes and improves proving and verification times, while the integration of private tokens and NFTs is bringing us closer to launching the final stress test before the mainnet launch.
The new Navio X Wallet has also acquired a handful of updates. sakdeniz introduced the option to create a wallet using a seed phrase, along with indicators for verifying private keys and monitoring the wallet’s blockchain scanning process. A new rescan blockchain modal has also been added, together with illustrations, a new about page and various other improvements.
In November, the Web3PrivacyNow Congress took place in Bangkok. CR1337 was live at the scene and dishes out his report:
“The Cypherpunk Congress in Bangkok organized by Web3Privacy was an inspiring and encouraging event: many people from different corners of the world, with different backgrounds, many developers who all have a common goal: To bring privacy and the Cypherpunk ethos back to the forefront. I met many like-minded people and had good conversations, talking about Navio and the Private Finance Syndicate (PFS); I am very grateful to the Web3Privacy team for their work and hope there will be many more events!”
In PriFi news these are some headlines worth mentioning.
Huge win in the Tornado Cash case. The US Court of Appeals ruled the sanctions on Tornado Cash smart contracts as unlawful, as the Treasury overstepped its authority when sanctioning immutable smart contracts. However, the fight is not over yet. The Dutch court currently holding Tornado Cash dev Alexey Pertsev has denied his second bid to get out of prison ahead of his appeal. The day writing code will not be seen as a crime is the day we will truly be free. Some more food for thought about the ruling.
Chat control wasback on the EU regulations menu. The proposal argues for messaging services to scan private communications for illegal content. This could result in apps installing backdoors, threatening user privacy. Not only would this be a threat to encryption, but would most likely result in a flood of irrelevant reports.
Samourai Wallet lives on. A group of developers created a fork of the wallet, called the Ashigaru Open Source Project. The project operates independently of the original Samourai team, although it builds upon their code using CoinJoin to obscure Bitcoin transactions. Long live censorship resistance open-source!
As much as the losers and haters would like Chainalysis to be the nail in the coffin of anonymous transactions, the latest Cointelegraph article claiming that Monero transactions may be traceable has had the opposite effect. Chainalysis had to resort to desperate measures such as malicious nodes and DNS hijacking to extract a worthless amount of onchain information. See for yourselves.
Until the next one. Cheers.
