The decentralized blockchain project Tron (TRX) has announced the beta testing of its privacy feature Zk-SNARK (Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge) to put users’ transaction information in obscurity.
“Zero-knowledge” proofs allow one party (the prover) to prove to another (the verifier) that a statement is true, without revealing any information beyond the validity of the statement itself. For example, given the hash of a random number, the prover could convince the verifier that there indeed exists a number with this hash value, without revealing what it is.
The Chinese CEO, Justin Sun made the announcement by a tweet on December 17. He said Tron is implementing the zk-SNARKs technology to introduce a “totally guarded” transactions. As he wrote, TRON uses multi-party computing (MPC) protocol, as does Zcash, to transparently and securely create “zero knowledge” proofs and prevent malicious attacks from shielded transactions.
At the time, Sun did not specify an exact launch date for the public beta version.
(1/5) #TRON is about to beta-test its shielded transaction.?️⛓️
Shielded transactions hide:
1⃣Sender and receiver’s addresses;
2⃣Transaction input and output;
3⃣Amount transacted.— Justin Sun (@justinsuntron) December 17, 2019
TRON’s private transaction is not something new
This is not the first time TRON implements private transactions. As early as December 2018, Sun spoke about the initial progress of the development. He explained that a higher level of privacy and anonymity is urgently needed in today’s data-driven society, as both websites and search engines monetize user data. He also stated at the time that not all TRON transactions will be necessarily shielded. Instead, TRON intends to implement the feature as optional. He said that users should be able to decide if they want a private transaction.
All of this, and more, leads to a “compromise of privacy” that Sun wants to prevent as part of TRON’s vision of a Web 4.0 platform.
TRON becomes more private
Despite being the first and most known cryptocurrency, many claimed Bitcoin does not keep privacy in its transactions, becoming the premise for the creation of new cryptocurrencies that claim to offer optimum privacy. Privacy has been a pivoting innovation that makes cryptocurrency impose on the finance industry. However, authorities find this feature problematic and show hostility towards digital currencies.
Created with the aim of making the internet completely decentralized, TRON has been on the path to join the privacy-oriented cryptocurrency space for a period of time, because it feels the security of transactions will help promote its decentralization mission.
Therefore, joining the league of privacy cryptocurrency is a huge step of TRON. After the announcement of the beta testing of the zk-SNARKs technology, it is clear the 12th largest cryptocurrency by market cap is just one step away from becoming a privacy-oriented cryptocurrency.
zk-SNARKs, a novel form of zero-knowledge cryptography, is a technology designed by developers of Zcash to make blockchain transaction info anonymous which has helped reduce the storage requirements for private transactions by 97% since the Sapling upgrade. The shielded transaction takes about one to two minutes, compared to other normal crypto transactions that take seconds to be created. To increase the speed of transaction, Zcash engineer Sean Bowe and cryptographers Matthew Green and Ian Miers released a new form of zk-SNARK in 2017.
Most recently, Tezos had announced to investigate the introduction of zk-SNARKS and expected to introduce it in 2020. And, Cardano had also shown interest in the “zero knowledge” proof technology. In addition, Ethereum is also focusing on greater interoperability with Zcash with the Istanbul hard fork.
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