Computational Privacy Networks—A Comparison

Why computational privacy?

Blockchain and Web3.0 are rapidly evolving, and over less than a decade we’ve seen the rise of transactional networks like Bitcoin and smart-contract networks like Ethereum.

However, most blockchains are public and expose user data on a ledger. And although we have seen numerous transactional privacy networks emerge—like Monero and Zcash—there are only a few computational privacy networks that allow for private smart contract executions.

Why we created this comparison

With this overview, we hope to inform readers of the different computational privacy networks that are currently on mainnet or testnet. It serves to educate readers on the differences in technologies used, their current state of development and adoption, and technical specifications.

A note on computational vs transactional privacy

This comparison does not include any transactional privacy networks, as these serve a different use case. Transactional privacy networks focus on the private transactions of currencies, while computational privacy networks focus on the private execution of smart contracts.

The comparison

For the comparison, ten computational privacy networks were considered. Five of them were not included because they either a) had no public token yet b) provided too little information in their public resources for a meaningful comparison c) did not provide a full smart contract environment. These were: BEAM, Aleo, Railgun, Panther and Aleph Zero.