Making ethereum institution friendly & solving the duality of confidentiality — Part B (Cryptography behind the Silent Compliance VM)
Silent Compliance VM -part B
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After what we all went through in 2022, we can reasonably conclude that building trustless infrastructure is the only way to move forward. We need to build decentralised, trustless and permissionless infrastructure for that reason.
In this post we will go over the existing infrastructure of our current web3 stack that will help us build decentralised and trustless applications and go over components that we will need to pay attention to in the near future.
Making on-applications useful through trustless at-request data services
DApps are heavy consumers of data and require nodes to make this data available to users or applications running on-chain. There are several ways in which decentralised applications can access high fidelity data in a trustless and efficient manner.
We have developed Oracle networks that allows us to provide users access to data streams otherwise not available on-chain, thereby allowing crypto networks to interface with each other both traditional and inter blockchain systems, in a reliable and decentralised manner. Supraoracles, API3 and Chainlink are examples in this category.
Improving application UI/UX
On-chain messaging remains a key component of blockchain infrastructure. As retail demand grows, the ability for applications/protocols to interact in a meaningful yet decentralised manner with their users will be a key driver of growth.
A few potential areas where on-chain messaging could be useful would be in notifying users to claim returns / tokens, allowing for in-built communication messaging within wallets and allowing for announcements / notifications regarding important protocol updates. A few protocols namely in this category would be EPNS and XMTP.
Improving on-chain data usability
Applications built on blockchains work or rely on on-chain and external data. Data stored on a chain isn’t registered in a format that can efficiently or easily be consumed by Dapps. In most applications, you need features like relational data, sorting, filtering, full text search, pagination and many other types of querying capabilities.
In order to do this, data needs to be indexed and organised for efficient retrieval. We do this by building protocols that allow us to query and index blockchain data in a decentralised and robust fashion. Some protocols in this field would be The Graph, Covalent etc.
Reducing web2 dependency by decentralising storage and compute through dCloud
dCloud is a term used to describe the next step in the evolution of cloud services. This is a model where we spread the data and compute across many nodes, rather than being centrally located, as is the case with Web2.
This allows for greater fault tolerance and also makes it possible to distribute tasks more evenly, leading to improved performance. Storage is one of the key components of the decentralised cloud, and there are a number of different providers that offer this service. These include Ceramic Network, Textile ThreadDB, and GunDB.
All of these providers have their own benefits and drawbacks, but the dCloud ecosystem is still in its early stages and has yet to reach maturity. As a whole a few projects in this category would be Aleph, Akash network.
As the blockchain ecosystem as a whole expands and the number of layer-1s and secondary ecosystems (rollups) grow, there is an even greater need for managing composability and interoperability across chains.
Cross-chain bridges allow for otherwise siloed ecosystems to interact in a meaningful way — this is analogous to the way new trade routes helped connect otherwise disparate regions, ushering in a new era of knowledge sharing.
We have built generalised message passing solutions such as Layer Zero, Axelar and other bridging solutions that support generalised message passing, allowing all types of data and information — including tokens — to be moved across multiple ecosystems. Making the multichain dream a reality.
New design patterns such as establishing Data Availability chains that specialise in ordering transactions and making data available to the chains they support are sprouting out in the wild to support the vision of a multi chain and modular world.
Typically, the DA chains generate proofs that provide clients high probability confirmation that all block data has been published on-chain. Through these Proof of data availability we are able to guarantee the reliability of Rollup sequencers and reduce the cost of Rollup transaction processing in the multichain world. Celestia is a great example of this layer.
Using a centralised RPC provider potentially blacklists the users to the rules enforced by a single entity in control and makes access jailed. We need to build dRPCs that will enable the user to Decentralised remote procedure calls (RPCs) which empowers different computer systems to communicate with each other in a decentralized network.
In a decentralized RPC, a client system can send a request to a server system without needing to go through a central server or authority. Instead, the request is routed through the decentralized network, allowing it to be handled by the appropriate server. Pocket Network is an example in this category.
Applications on blockchains are data mines. Profitable, rent-seeking and exploitable data mines. Lacking the ability to secure transactions on public blockchains threatens end user’s will and personal data rights.
Web3 is equivalent to Ownership and control over one’s data. This is the one ast and most important step we need to be able to do to allow users to secure their personal data while they work on publicly verifiable ledger based systems.
Making privacy user friendly is a tough nut to crack and over 700MM in Venture investments, just in 2021 have been earmarked and poured in for support to bring privacy to users in web3.
Long gone are the days where we are just looking to just transfer account balances discreetly, we want to solve how we can allow users to call functions, privately. In other words, solve the problem of “functional privacy”. We need to solve the problem of the privacy trilemma.
There were two major puzzle pieces in web3 that we needed to solve at a user and protocol level. The first being the scalability trilemma and the second being the privacy trilemma for blockchains.
We want to build the same user experience that an individual enjoys on a public ledger system but in a privacy preserving manner.
The privacy trilemma is hereby defined that you can either build:
In other words, it is a trilemma because it’s very hard to build a system that is both private, programmable and composable (see the figure below)..
Therefore to solve the challenge of functional privacy, we at Silent Protocol want to build the appropriate web3 infrastructure that is modular and extensible. A tooling that can be deployed on existing public ledger systems and helps users embark on their journey in exploring composable and privacy preserving web3 for the first time.
Silent Protocol is a system that will grant a developer on a public blockchain ecosystem provide their users privacy preserving access to their applications with the help of just a SDK.
We solve the privacy trilemma defined above, by building secure access channels for users to use their favourite applications on public blockchains with complete composability, in a trustless and decentralised manner.
We do this through our patent pending EZEE framework. We are building one of the most important and crucial missing pieces for web3, that is going to allow users on public blockchains to embrace privacy preserving access to web3.
Privacy is required for providing security for user data on public blockchains, and we are trying to make that a reality. Silent Protocol is already in private alpha. We will be going live on multiple blockchains in 2023. If you are a project please reach out to us via silenprotocol.org, we would love to work with you.
Silent Compliance VM -part B
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How Silent will compliantly serve its users
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Announcing chapter 1: Becoming a Silencer
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