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The RAILGUN Privacy System shields wallet transactions within the Ethereum ecosystem while allowing consumers and corporations to anonymously participate in DeFi activities
RAILGUN, a decentralized smart contract project that brings privacy to cryptocurrencies and DeFi, announces the launch of the RAILGUN Privacy System 1.0. The RAILGUN Privacy System is the first crypto wallet privacy and anonymity shield built directly on-chain on Ethereum, and this release heralds the first time users can anonymously interact with distributed exchanges, lending platforms, and popular smart contract applications without having to leave the ETH ecosystem.
Open-ledger blockchains are designed to be fully transparent, meaning every bit of a person’s on-chain activity is available for the world to see, and always will be. Especially now, with commercial on-chain analytics, all user transactions are easily traceable, and once a connection is made between a wallet address and an individual, it is easy to follow every transaction they make.
Current privacy solutions are either set up off-chain, sacrificing convenience and flexibility, or lack important functionalities like being able to interact with other dApps in the ecosystem. RAILGUN’s on-chain privacy system allows Decentralized Finance to operate with security and privacy comparable to traditional fiat, which has been impossible until now.
Imagine, for a moment, if a corporation’s supply chains were on a blockchain. These transactions would all be visible to the public. Anyone with a modicum of technical savvy could, with a little bit of searching, discern payment details between the company and its prime suppliers – contract details that industries prefer to keep private. Transparent payments on a blockchain are a dream font of information for corporate espionage. Bringing this down to the level of the average consumer, just think what would happen if paying for a coffee immediately revealed your entire purchase history to everyone standing in line.
With the RAILGUN Privacy System, users can hold a shielded balance in a variety of tokens and can directly interact with DeFi protocols anonymously, ensuring full security. Because it is on-chain, the privacy system allows users to privately participate in all decentralized finance activities on Ethereum, including DEXs, dApps, and liquidity provision. As a layer-one application, the RAILGUN Privacy System also benefits from the security of primary blockchain layers, without the potential vulnerabilities of off-chain solutions.
The RAILGUN Privacy System, which is governed by the RAILGUN project’s Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), removes a wallet’s address from transactions, shielding the contents of the wallet (including NFTs) and making transactions untraceable. If a user ever needs to be transparent, the system can generate a verifiable report of transactions and balances, with a privacy-preserving Zero Knowledge method. The goal of the privacy tool is not to strip away the third-party verifiability of actions taken on-chain, but rather to give back to users the power to choose who sees what, when, and why.
Privacy on-chain is made possible by the utilization of “zk-SNARK” proofs – zero-knowledge proofs – that make it possible for both sides of a transaction to show to each other that they have the same exact information, but without revealing the information itself. In full, “zk-SNARK” stands for Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-interactive ARgument of Knowledge.
“Privacy is something all humans instinctively value. It is a well-recognized human right, and even those who deny it to others expect it for themselves,” said Kieren Mesquita, Chief Scientist with RAILGUN. “The goal of our project is to provide that right to everyone using cryptocurrency, from individuals making everyday purchases, to corporations paying suppliers, and even to governments overseeing a nation’s treasury.”
About RAILGUN
RAILGUN is a privacy project created to facilitate the development of a collection of smart contracts that verify zero-knowledge proofs, allowing users to make, send, or receive transactions without revealing any assets, amounts, or identities. The RAILGUN project is governed by a DAO and funded by a grant from the Right to Privacy Foundation. RAILGUN’s privacy system removes the wallet address from actions and transactions on blockchains through zero-knowledge proof (zk-SNARKs) technology. The RAILGUN development team is led by world-class security experts Dr. Andrey Kravchenko, Ph.D, chief scientist Kieran Mesquita, and cryptographer Hisham Galal, Ph.D. The project’s code is open-source.
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