Silent Protocol: Privacy on Public Blockchains - TOKEN2049 London 2022

my name is Issa satke I am the CTO of Silent protocol yesterday we have talked about the privacy in a broader term with a neem protocol and Aztec as well today we will kind of give a little teaser of our protocol if we can see the slides yep thank you and so let's start so as you already know that we have evm-based public chains yeah be it ethereum binance smart chain or Avalanche and through the evm flexibility we have Cambrian explosion of different decentralized applications such as decentralized Finance let's have a Olympus uni Swap and so on but the key issue here is what about privacy so privacy is a broader term at its core we can Define it as to have right to manage one their own private data let's say personal identifiable information so when we restrict this definition into the blockchain currently the users should have the right to manage their own data hide their business interactions with other parties they should be able to hide their amounts that within the transactions but unfortunately most of the public chains do not have this flexibility and this feature so we because of this there are you can still many privacy preserving Solutions evolving yeah we can count allele Mina tornado cash Aztec and Aztec connect as well so from our side we see that there are some problems yeah because the users need to have a privacy solution with a complete anonymity and confidentiality yeah and other that the most important issue here is that having a privacy on in a sub maybe layer one maybe Layer Two wouldn't be enough because we have these trans decentralized applications and the users should need to be able to have full compost ability with the decentralized applications so you can be an Institutional Investor and you would like to hide your trading strategy or investment strategy that shouldn't be linked to your identity because at the same time if any other competitor would be able to see your actions your strategy will be leaked at the same time apart from this so the issue is would it be possible to have privacy preserving solution without any dependencies without needing to scan all the transaction history if you have a private transaction where you are the recipient so these are the main problems but much important than this the main issue recently became how privacy preserving Solutions can be compliant so of course compliance is another broad term there are kyc procedures AML procedures counter-terrorism financing but the issue here is that we want to provide the end users to have their privacy but at the same time regulatory bodies require that the Privacy preserving Solutions shouldn't be used as a shielding for criminal activities so we have seen the sanction of ofak so taught towards tornado cash because some of the stolen assets were brought into them and afterwards we have seen some of the central exchange the listed privacy ever coins and tokens for instance well with this and they listed zero cash Z cash Monero Dash so we need to have a compliant solution in here but apart from this we also see that the adoption rates are low as well so we believe that the users while they are wanting to have privacy they do not want to leave their so-called trusted environment they want to have the privacy on their own environment right they are keeping their assets already because they get used to the chain they get used to the specific application as well and letting them or forcing them okay if you need identity privacy then you need to move assets into another place into another chain doesn't work much we can see the low adoption rates over in other private server layer one Solutions and also the another reason for the law of adoption is that the asynchronous function calls dependency to the other intermediary wallets or applications without letting user experience is another reason of course so there should be a way of providing a functional privacy without affecting users experience so that users can can get on board with these private server Solutions so to do this we are aiming to provide silent protocol to be as much user friendly as possible at the same time we are trying to make it as simple as possible and we are trying to provide the normal user workflow and interaction flow without changing anything about you for that we have provided and we are started uh within last year we have started development of our silent protocol and Silent protocol is actually on the application layer behaves as a middleware that the users and the developers can have the full composability on the basic logic of the existing underlying public shape how we achieve this so here at the core we have silent call here the users will be able to deposit their transactions into our smart contract and the smart contract would keep track of user balances in an encrypted form and along with while they're depositing their transactions they will be able to also provide transfers within the multi-asset shielded pool here and afterwards users will be able to withdraw their assets whenever they would like to do so of course this is in the application layer but apart from this we have the Reno's parts and the zero depth parts that I'm going to explain in a second so as I said before here we have the malta asset shielded pool this shielded pool supports both ethereum and erc20s and ERC 71 to one and ERC 1155. type of tokens within the pool so that as I said before users can move their assets into this pool as a commitment and whenever they would like to initiate a transaction they need to provide the ZK snark base proves to ensure that the computations correctly computed and the smart contract behaves as a non-custodial wallet here and as a judge as well in the meantime validates these proofs and if they if they will proof is validated then the small contract would update the user States and it's the same when the users would like to withdraw their assets from the pools as well this is the core part of our scheme but this wouldn't be enough on the network side so we are depending on the underlying blockchain so the transparent nature of the underlying blockchain would also bring us to handle the metadata processing through the transactions so we are using renal players so that the users can kind of relay their transactions so that they can hide their uh basic information that is related to their main accounts as well and this is the second block of our smart silent protocol and of course having the multi-asset shielded pool at core wouldn't be enough as we said we are trying to provide a hundred percent composability with the decentralized applications to manage that we already in collaboration with different uh decentralized Finance protocols one is Ave the other is um Olympus and also we are in in contact with a banku from our lives and Trader Joe and the Euler protocol as well so in the development side we integrate these decentralized application as a sub-module into our front-end application so that users wouldn't need to change or move between the applications So within the same application they will have an access to these decentralized protocols with the identifiers that will be created within the smart within the silent core logic and once they move their asset today these identifiers they will not need to pay or deal with the computational complexity and the gas fees as well they can have the full functionality they can get the full functionality from the decentralized applications and as a last building block we have this compliance extension so this is one of the crucial issues here so we want to provide privacy for the good users but we cannot be hosting the criminal activities at the same time because this would result in sanction of the and PRI and innocent privacy privacy and manner aware users as well so to do that we also composing a compliance group and that includes neutral privacy Advocate parties so that in case of an unnoticed criminal activity the assets would be brought into our protocol these parties can run a vote voting on this proposal and if it is certain that this specific account is involved in a criminal activity then the transaction details of this party color address can be provided to the regulatory bodies so that we can kind of protect at first we protect our innocent users from getting sanctioned because of these type of regulations and also this is kind of an stop sign so that the as a result of these criminal activities the people wouldn't be preferring these kind of assets to be brought into our solution so how we are going to do how we are achieving this so in court contrary to the existing Solutions we here we provide account based model because there is two yeah mainly there are two solutions to achieve privacy one is utxo based model so every time an asset is deposited into the pools a commitment is created but in this manner there is a deficiency because the solution needs to carry keep a nullifier set to prevent double spending problem and over time this nullifier set gets bigger and bigger and bigger that would affect the efficiency of the system in order to resist this type of this efficiency we choose to have account based model and of course we are utilizing zero knowledge base proofs that case snarks here with along with the malta asset shielded pool and we have the core Parts the building parts from the decentralized applications and the compliance as well I'm sorry so to sum up we are currently in the test net we are planning to deploy our Solution on the main net in the first quarter maybe the second quarter of next week next year and if you have any questions I would like to answer and if you would like to learn more we can get in touch at the venue thank you for listening me and thank you think silent think privacy thank you very much as I was an excellent presentation big round of applause thank you so much thank you