Zerocoin Flaws, Private Atomic Swap Adoption, and UX [An Analysis]

We started as a PoW coin however soon realised for the sake of security (namely preventing 51% attacks and ASIC miners), we'd be better suited to having a Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism. So we moved over from mining to staking without a hitch and took advantage of this new setup by developing our own 'Leased Proof-of-Stake' mechanism, which allows users to stake their coins via a service provider who take a small percentage from each staking reward for running the service.

A little background on NIX - I'll keep this bit concise.

NIX Platform launched on June 27th, 2018 with its' own bespoke blockchain based on Bitcoin Core 0.17. We hit the ground running, with mainnet live from Day 1 and over 300 masternodes live within a couple of weeks of launch.

This was only possible due to the initial distribution method chosen - a 2:1 claimed airdrop/faucet to holders of a (since re-branded) community coin that some of the team had worked on previously. There was no ICO for NIX at all, no private equity sales or even pre-mines. This is a self-funded project, a rare beast in this arena!

We started as a PoW coin however soon realised for the sake of security (namely preventing 51% attacks and ASIC miners), we'd be better suited to having a Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism. So we moved over from mining to staking without a hitch and took advantage of this new setup by developing our own 'Leased Proof-of-Stake' mechanism, which allows users to stake their coins via a service provider who take a small percentage from each staking reward for running the service.

This means users no longer have to leave their wallet running in staking mode - they can instantly set up an LPoS contract with any merchant they find, keep full control of their coins - within their own wallet - and if they wish, cancel the contract at any point and instantly have their collateral coins and rewards available to spend again. 

There is a transparent dev fund containing a nice chunk of NIX for development, and several months ago NIX rolled out its Off-Chain Governance system, whereby external developers, marketing companies or even community members can pitch for funds.  

Proposals are approved or rejected by holders of NIX who actively take part in securing the network - meaning both masternode operators AND all smaller holders who stake their coins get a say in the project's development. Since we launched slap-bang in the middle of bear market, we've made every effort not to pillage the dev fund to ensure longevity of the project.

We feel it's important to box clever and plan for 5, 10 years ahead and beyond, with the largest expense to date being for listing NIX on KuCoin.

So what's different about the privacy features of NIX?

NIX Platform is unique in the fact it uses something we call the 'Ghost Protocol', a chameleon-like ensemble of various underlying privacy protocols, which can be updated, swapped, combined or removed as privacy technology develops and improves.

Think of the Ghost Protocol as a Swiss army knife of tools which are utilised both at consensus level (without the user needing to know about it) or client-side in our various wallets (Tor networking), allowing the user to choose a higher level of privacy should they wish.  

We like world-firsts at NIX, and I'd like to highlight a cutting-edge privacy feature that we enveloped into the Ghost Protocol - 'Pedersen Commitment Key-Packs', as implemented in NIX '2-Way Ghosting' performed through the Ghost Vault. A genuinely groundbreaking development, a user can now send coins to any other user, with ‎total sender/receiver anonymity (think Mimblewimble but on a Bitcoin Core codebase, without the listener node attack vector).

This allows privatised NIX to be sent from one wallet to another wallet with no identifiable trace being left on the blockchain explorer - as though it's been sent through a wormhole.  

It is then up to the receiver if they wish to make the privatised coins public or to keep in the Ghost Vault for a longer time period, which would further increase the individuals' privacy (along with the overall network privacy set). NIX has committed a lot of time into Mimblewimble and Lelantus R&D in 2020 with a view to further enhancing the Ghost Protocol in H2.

There are several other privacy features already at work within the Ghost Protocol of which you can read more over on our website, but first a little bit about adoption.

Why the Ghost Protocol is important for adoption - some context relating to the Zerocoin flaw...

A perfect example of the Ghost Protocol's fluidity was the smooth transition from Zerocoin to SIGMA. Several coins using this technology received a private disclosure of a severe vulnerability from Reuben at ZCoin which (at the time) meant the entire protocol could be compromised, and several privacy coins (and their clones) had been, and still were getting 'hacked'.  

There's plenty of information out there on this incident, but public coins could be created afresh from a targeted coin's Zerocoin implementation due to a cryptographic flaw in the underlying code.  This kind of incident is uncommon, but no code is full-proof, and if it ever hits you want to have confidence in the team's abilities.

With NIX, we could verify that we weren't compromised (using analysis of our emission schedule and chain data) and mitigated the flaw within days (and before public disclosure) by halting the Zerocoin protocol while we figured out the next steps.  S

everal weeks after that, SIGMA libraries were released for public discourse and we went to work validating SIGMA as our Zerocoin replacement. Once the libs were working in harmony with the overall Ghost Protocol, testnet came, some bugs were ironed out and NIX soon became the first Proof-of-Stake coin to have SIGMA on Mainnet.

Users had limited functionality of our Ghost Vault while this was happening - initially any already-privatised coins became 'locked' as the zerocoin protocol was disabled.  

Weeks later more information became known about the flaw, allowing us to implement our own fix to safeguard the integrity of the blockchain as Zerocoin was re-enabled.  Users could now safely redeem their (now legacy) privatised coins back to on-chain with a simple console command. 

The Ghost Protocol allowed us to implement SIGMA alongside the disabled Zerocoin protocol in a seamless manner.

NIX coins are now privatised using a different cryptographic implementation behind the scenes, but the front-end keeps the same methodology and terminology - our Ghost Protocol is still the Ghost Protocol, the Ghost Vault is still the Ghost Vault, Ghosting and Un-Ghosting is kept and everything looks the same. 

So yes, SIGMA replaced Zerocoin as the core privacy feature in the Ghost Protocol, but the advantage NIX has is that our casual users don't know any different.

This demographic rarely wants to be bombarded with technical guides of how to operate new technology after they've invested their sacred time figuring out the old way. They might only need to use a wallet a few times each year so having that familiarity is important for user experience. 

The smooth transition (from both a technical and UX perspective) was due to the dev team's understanding of the full codebase and integration experience as well as the UX team's foresight.

This is mirrored with all other development work (including Flare Wallet) and we feel it's a strategy that puts us in good stead for providing one of the best user experiences in crypto, helping to encourage the adoption of NIX as an ever more widely used privacy currency as well as innovating for the greater good.  

Solid stuff, what about private cross-chain atomic swaps?

The world's first (...yes, another one) automated privacy atomic swap was performed by the NIX and Flare Wallet teams several months ago, between the NIX and KMD chains via AtomicDEX. You can read that announcement here.

NIX offers interoperability with other coins (as seen with our privacy swap proof-of-concept) and at Flare Wallet we're now building solutions on top of these developments to elevate the user experience and privacy options for any integrated coin or token.

Swapping cryptocurrency privately will be as simple and liberating as using Flare's standard swap service.

So if instant and private swaps via a slick, non-custodial multi-currency wallet sounds like a good match for your preferred cryptocurrency, token or stablecoin, if the possibility of masternode management on iOS and Android piques your interest, or maybe you'd rather be managing your leased staking directly from your phone - Flare can provide these features. 

You can download Flare Wallet now - desktop and mobile wallets are already released with new features being rolled out frequently.  If you enjoy the wallet, please touch base with the team of any coin you want to see in Flare Wallet to let them know there's demand for integration.

Flare Wallet offers non-custodial lite-wallet coin storage, mobile masternode management, staking, instant swaps and soon privacy swaps for your coin via the NIX network.

We're a small but competent team, placing UX and Privacy at the forefront of our solutions.

Cheers,
Jeff

Disclaimer: The author is a contributor for Flare Wallet and NIX Platform. He was a holder of NIX from it's inception (prior to working closely with both projects)