Encrypting Ethereum in 3..2..

Surprise, you can’t actually transfer money to anyone with an Eth address privately today; you have mixers, but not a secure value transfer layer. No, this is the first. Focus.

So we want to encrypt Ethereum. Like — allow you to transfer money to anyone privately — and use existing applications privately to its fullest capability. All of it. We want Ethereum as it is today but with the complete coverage of privacy. It shouldn’t feel different.

In simple terms, that is exactly what we are building at Silent Protocol.

Our vision is to enable a secure, anonymous, computational access layer.

And this is made up of two components:

1. A secure value transfer layer
2. An architecture that enables us to interact with an application privately.

What is a secure value transfer layer?
A place where users can store their assets and transfer to others when needed under complete confidentiality and anonymity while staying on Ethereum.

This is exactly what our soon-to-be-launched Ghost Layer is doing.

Why is this a big deal, when there are other privacy protocols on Ethereum?

Existing privacy protocols act like a mixer. Mixers in general can be defined as systems that perform a simple deposit and withdraw option, while providing privacy. Even tho there are some protocols that have the algorithm to support a “transfer” functionality (as in send money privately from one user to another), incorrect implementations of it have made users utilize the “withdraw” function in such protocols to perform the initial transfer operation — aka the user leaves the privacy protocol.

This makes the whole idea of building a privacy layer redundant and moot.

Yeah that’s the reality. Silent Protocol is addressing this by implementing two novel algorithms along with the popular “Deposit, Withdraw, Transfer” set helping build the first ever secure value transfer layer for Ethereum. Users can send money to anyone both anonymously and confidentially. More details about this will be announced soon.

In the grand vision of Silent Protocol, the second objective is to create an ecosystem of privacy-preserving applications. Essentially an ecosystem for smart contract or application privacy.

The need for composable privacy

There have been attempts at bringing privacy to applications. Primarily through a design pattern called “Gunztec” (A term coined by us, ‘Gun’ from railgun and ‘ztec’ from Aztec v2(zk.money)). Its a 3-actor model — that allows a user to call an existing smart contract function privately.

It’s an attempt at bypassing the conditions of State Denial allowing the user access to shared state privately.

However it ends up creating “SubSpaces” with the target contract:

What are subspaces?
It’s a virtual channel existing between the user and the target contract in a 3-actor model or Gunztec model through the help of the intermediary contract. This pattern of smart contract interaction limits the user from fully interfacing with the target contract and can only interact with certain functions.

What is this composable privacy?

and why is this shared state so important?

If the vision is to encrypt Ethereum we need to be able to view and interact with the existing state of the ledger while preserving privacy. Historically this has been a big problem.

When we use encryption as a first principal to drive the entire system state forward, we cut access off of essential information from the global ledger, making the systems in-composable with the rest of the ecosystem. This is seen in any architecture/technology/framework stack.

To solve this problem there has been birth of a new kind of design domain for privacy protocols known as the “hybrid ZK architecture”.

The era of Hybrid ZK architecture

In theory system design that utilizes two different tech stack to build a global state shift, can be termed as a hybrid ZK system but in order for these hybrid ZK stack to make a state change it shouldn’t use, encryption as the first mechanism to update the system state.

There are three different known models of hybrid ZK architecture that avoids the problem of state denial and enables composable privacy.

1. Gunztec model
2. coSnark
3. EZEE

We already learnt about Gunztec model, now let’s take a look at coSNARK:

coSnark acknowledges the problem of State Denial and enables multiple users to compute on private data through MPC and verify the state update through ZK to move the system forward. This enables other applications to query off of the system and allow for flexible use cases while enabling privacy. However, unlike Gunztec, coSnark even tho is focused on creating connected privacy aware applications — it doesn’t allow for providing privacy to existing Ethereum applications.

Finally coming down to EZEE

EZEE allows us to enable HYPER COMPOSABILITY for the first time ever. It allows a user to use an application with complete flexibility under concrete privacy guarantees. EZEE is made up of an encryption layer and an execution layer. The Ghost Layer (LAUNCHING SOON) acts as the encryption layer — providing user data privacy. It is connected to the execution layer through EZEE signals through different 0dapps, allowing for application privacy.

At the end its all about composability with the rest of the ecosystem when it comes to the objective of encrypting Ethereum and EZEE stands to be the best framework for that.

Silent Protocol is launching its Ghost Layer soon. It will be the first ever secure value transfer layer for Ethereum built under the EZEE framework.

Roadmap now :

Look out for the “Disjunction of Spirits.” The campaign is launching soon. There WILL be ALPHA. Time to focus, anon.

Next: Silent Protocol will be launching its Ghost Layer in February 2025. Soon, yes. Be excited? Very.

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