4 Projects Championing Privacy in Blockchain

Privacy is a word often thrown around by governmental agencies, big tech companies, blockchain builders, and the media. But more than not, it is a secondary problem to solve, an add-on to an existing system.

But we know that our privacy is being taken from us, we see this around us all the time. Moving our lives onto the internet started it, social media accelerated it, and blockchain pushed our finances out of the realm of the private and into the public. And there are some benefits for sure, but we don’t even fully yet appreciate what we have lost. But there are projects out there that are dedicated to putting personal privacy first.

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At ZKValidator, we believe privacy should be at the cornerstone of Web3; and that’s why one of our goals is to give visibility to these projects. And as part of this Data Privacy Week, we wanted to feature 4 Projects Championing Privacy in Blockchain.

TL;DR If you want to take a look at our infographic rather than reading the whole article, click here.

Aztec: Scalable Privacy on Ethereum

Basically, Aztec is trying to accomplish 3 goals in regards to privacy on Ethereum:

1. Identity Privacy: Using cryptographic anonymity, they want to hide the sender and recipient identities.
2. Balance Privacy (Currently active): Since with Aztec the transactions amounts will be encrypted, the balance of your account would be kept private.
3. Code Privacy: Network observers can’t even see which asset or service a transaction belongs to.

This will be possible since Aztec is building what they call a “super-fast privacy engine on Ethereum” which aims to protect your data while ensuring gas prices are kept down by using a ZK-ZK Rollup. The TurboPLONK solution they currently have on testnet is 9 times cheaper than current gas prices.

Aztec’s magic happens due to the use of the ZK-ZK Rollup for PLONK proofs, which besides making Ethereum more scalable, truly preserves the privacy of the users.

While a “traditional” ZK Roll up leverages the “succinctness” property of SNARKs to scale public blockchains, ZK-ZK Rollups combine SNARKS at two or more layers to offer scalability and privacy.

At the moment, Aztec has made public zk.money, a product that allows you to send and receive payments on Ethereum anonymously.

Penumbra: Private Trading in Any Crypto Asset

Next up, we have Penumbra which is building the first fully shielded proof-of-stake blockchain as a Layer-1 network within the Cosmos ecosystem; basically, they are building a “private zone” for people to trade within from any IBC compatible network.

Currently, Penumbra is building a private DEX that allows users to keep their information private that sits on top of their shielded blockchain because, as it’s founder Henry de Valence has said, it’s almost impossible to build a truly private application, a DEX, in this case, using a transparent blockchain

And the team believes that it’s not easy to preserve privacy by only using ZK-Rollups. While in a transparent blockchain, all the transactions are visible to all users, the “shielded blockchain” Penumbra is building will only allow localized, per-user updates to specific fragments of the application state.

Nym: Building the next generation of privacy infrastructure

While current internet protocols, even those with end-to-end encryption, make personal data and patterns accessible to intermediaries, Nym is building the infrastructure needed to prevent this leakage by protecting every packet’s metadata at the network and application layers.

They are working in an ecosystem of these key components: a Mixnet and Nym Credentials.

• The mixnet: is a decentralized and permissionless network in which a user’s data gets “mixed” with other users’ data to prevent data surveillance. It’s distributed in 3 layers in which the data is sent with added layers of encryption.
• Nym Credentials: This service allows users to prove to providers the right to use for a given service, including attributes as well as proof of payments for services without revealing other information.

Any application can connect to Nym because it’s an agnostic network, giving the opportunity to any digital service provider to protect its user data. In comparison with VPNs, currently the most popular network-level privacy solution, Nym achieves its goals of preserving the user’s data because of its decentralised nature.

Aleo: The ultimate toolkit for building private applications.

And last but not least in our list of 4 Projects Championing Privacy in Blockchain we have Aleo, which is a data privacy-oriented blockchain and developer kit to make writing zero-knowledge proofs in web applications easy and scalable.

Aleo’s initial release is made up of four different components:

1. Aleo Studio: the first integrated development environment (IDE) for writing privacy-focused, zero-knowledge applications.
2. The Aleo Package Manager: focused on allowing developers to manage and store data packages. Integrated with Aleo Studio, the package manager makes it easier for developers to organize and share their work.
3. SnarkOS: a decentralized operating system for private web applications and the first implementation of the Aleo protocol.
4. Leo: a programming language that looks and feels like javaScript, making it accessible to developers without cryptography knowledge. With Leo, devs can build anything from dark pools to components for applications like password-free login.

If you want to support privacy in the blockchain ecosystem, you can delegate to us on any of the networks we are active such as Cosmos, Polkadot, Kusama, Celo, Osmosis, Mina, NEAR, and Moonriver.

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