Privacy is believed to be an attribute native to all blockchain systems, and it was thought that it was difficult to link people’s online identities with their offline identities. However, hackers, law enforcement, and data scientists have proven that not only can offline identities be linked to activity on the blockchain, they also showed that it was fairly easy to do it. With this realization, newer blockchains in the market prioritize strengthening their blockchain networks’ privacy. In this article, we will take a look at one innovation that strengthens user privacy on the blockchain and a blockchain project built around user privacy.
ZK-Snarks Introduction
The ZK-Snarks protocol was first used in the blockchain ZCash. ZK-Snarks is not an innovation and first made its appearance in the public domain in 1988. In a nutshell, ZK-Snarks is a way to reduce the amount of interaction needed between a prover and verifier in a network to confirm that each has the information or data that they say they do. Let’s look at how this is made possible by taking a deeper look at the ZK-Snarks protocol.
An In-Depth Look At ZK-Snarks
ZK-Snarks stands for Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge. It is a cryptographic method that enables one party to prove to another party that it has the information it says it does without revealing its information to the other party. Before this transaction can take place, a private key needs to be created. Let’s now take a look at the different parts of the ZK-Snarks protocol.
Zero-Knowledge
The core concept of the ZK-Snarks protocol is that one party can prove to another party that it has certain information. The party trying to prove that it has the information that it says it does is called the prover, and the party that it’s trying to prove it to is called the verifier. However, data security is strengthened, seeing that the process of one party proving to another that it has specific information can take place without exposing the information; this is what makes the protocol Zero-Knowledge. One party has the information and knows what the information contains, and the verifier can verify that the party has the information without even seeing it or having any knowledge of what is contained in the information.
Succinct
Another key characteristic of ZK-Snarks is that the size of the messages is “succinct” or trivial compared to the transaction. This makes messages on the ZK-Snarks protocol easily verifiable and decreases the time to verify data to a few milliseconds. The lengths of the proofs on the network are small in bytes, no matter how big the transaction payload is.
Non-Interactive
Verifiers and provers in a network that implements the ZK-Snarks protocol have very little, sometimes no, interaction with each other. This makes the protocol non-interactive.
Argument
Lastly, arguments are computational limits set on provers to prevent them from sending false information, such as transactions, to verifiers.
To Recap
The privacy of legacy blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum was proven to be not as strong as many had hoped and believed. This led to newer blockchains researching methods to increase user privacy on their blockchains. Although not new to the world, one protocol has shown a lot of potential for strengthening user privacy on a blockchain network and is called the ZK-Snarks protocol. With its first successful implementation in blockchain technology being in ZCash, ZK-Snarks allows nodes on the network to prove that they hold certain information without exposing the information to the other node during verification.
CORE MultiChain Prioritizes User Privacy
CORE MultiChain is a blockchain ecosystem that connects private and public blockchains. One of the main benefits of connecting to their ecosystem is that blockchains can enjoy enhancements to their user privacy. By combining the ZK-Snarks protocol with transaction mixers, which break the link between an input and output transaction, CORE MultiChain gives users their privacy back.
