Some of the challenges faced by privacy blockchains include scalability and useability. Yet, one privacy coin believes it has the answer to solving these with its new protocol.
Zcoin, which in November had a Thai song added to its blockchain to fight censorship and government corruption, has released an academic paper for its Lelantus protocol. It is due to be deployed in 2019. Created by Zcoin, which is focused on delivering privacy and anonymity for its users, the aim of the protocol is to fix the issues that privacy blockchains face.
In an announcement, Reuben Yap, COO of Zcoin, said: “Current privacy protocols need to be improved. Most require tradeoffs on either scalability, anonymity, ease of use or they are underprinned by experimental cryptography. We created Lelantus to tackle these issues and offer a well-rounded solution to users.”
Zcoin’s current privacy protocol, Zerocoin, gives users privacy over their transactions through zero-knowledge cryptographic proofs. However, the Zerocoin protocol and others require users to anonymise coins in fixed denominations to protect privacy.
According to Yap, while Lelantus provides the same level of protection to users, it’s more flexible and user-friendly. Not only that, but it is claimed to be scalable, with its zero-knowledge proofs taking up 1.5kb on the blockchain. This is compared to the current 25kb on Zerocoin. On top of that, but the team note that Lelantus doesn’t require a trusted setup, requiring specific initial parameters to be destroyed to prevent users from creating coins out of nothing.
“Performance is a crucial aspect in any transaction privacy protocol and must be practical to implement,” said Aram Jivanyan, the author of the Lelantus protocol, who serves as the Cryptography Advisor of Zcoin. “Many privacy protocols use zkSNARKs to improve computations, but Lelantus is able to achieve this without a trusted setup by sticking to well established cryptographic assumptions. It it both fast and storage-efficient without compromising on privacy and confidentiality.”
Other benefits that Lelantus delivers over Zerocoin, as noted by the academic paper, include the need for fixed demoninations is removed, a single transaction can contain a number of spends and output multiple coins, and transaction amounts are hidden.