Privacy is Krypto’s soul and without it means nothing else we really do.
If you are interested in financial sovereignty, you need privacy. If you are interested in coordinating with others to implement social change or think freely or build a more prosperous society, you need the free exchange of value. Freedom begins with privacy.
As engineers and researchers working on Zcash, we have spent years developing private economic tools that will be embedded in the future of civilization. It is no exaggeration to say that our descendants will either live in a world that rests on the basis that we build today, otherwise lives in a world that we neglected.
Zcash was the first cryptocurrency to send real, strong privacy with zero-knowledge evidence. It was only the first step to solve privacy with cryptography: We had to quickly iterate and improve our cryptography, so it was convenient to run on phones and invest strongly in research that would make it possible to scale. Today, our innovations sit in the heart of many decentralized protocols.
But while the path to scale the private payments on the chain are now straightforward, no project has dealt with the fundamental challenge of scaling private wallets at the same time.
Most Cryptocurrencies users will use wallet software that depends on an external server to enable the dispatch and receipt of payments. This helps to solve scaling problems by pushing bandwidth and calculation burdens away from users’ devices, but comes at the expense of requiring the user to give up their privacy for remote services.
To make our privacy-preserving monetary project a reality, we need a user experience that is as practical as one that has no privacy at all.
The simplest solution is to use exotic cryptography to enable remote servers to help our local wallet software without revealing private information. We have known that this theoretical is possible, but until recently it seemed to be impractical on a scale – at least a decade of new science away, or so we thought.
Enter Project Tachyon. With existing cryptography and some smart protocol adjustments, synchronizing with a very active blockchain full of transactions by outsourcing the expensive parts to unpaid third -party servers. The servers do not learn anything about your wallet and cannot even tell which on-chain transactions are similar to their users.
To be sure, the cryptography needed to make this possible and scalable is still not simple. Fortunately, Zcash has a long track record for building and shipping of this exact form of advanced cryptography. We have already set the stage for it in some of our recent upgrades, and with Project Tachyon we plan to make quick progress to implement the remaining changes in the next year.
I am excited that we have such strong enthusiasm and adaptation in the Zcash community to make it a reality. But I am also relieved that we can meet the moment and actually build very scalable, unstoppable digital money. We do not have time to wait for more research or scientific progress. Fortunately with Tachyon we can build and deliver today.
