Paper 2022/985
Privacy when Everyone is Watching: An SOK on Anonymity on the Blockchain
, Columbia UniversityAbstract
Blockchain technologies rely on a public ledger, where typically all transactions are pseudoanonymous and fully traceable. This poses a major flaw in its large scale adoption of cryptocurrencies, the primary application of blockchain technologies, as most individuals do not want to disclose their finances to the pub- lic. Motivated by the explosive growth in private-Blockchain research, this Statement-of-Knowledge (SOK) explores the ways to obtain privacy in this public ledger ecosystem. The authors first look at the underly- ing technology underling all zero-knowledge applications on the blockchain: zk-SNARKs (zero-knowledge Succinct Non-interactive ARguments of Knowledge). We then explore the two largest privacy coins as of today, ZCash and Monero, as well as TornadoCash, a popular Ethereum Tumbler solution. Finally, we look at the opposing incentives behind privacy solutions and de-anonymization techniques, and the future of privacy on the blockchain.
Metadata
- Available format(s)
-
PDF
- Category
- Applications
- Publication info
- Preprint.
- Keywords
- Blockchain zk-SNARK Cryptocurrencies
- Contact author(s)
-
roy rinberg @ columbia edu
agarwal nilaksh @ gmail com - History
- 2022-08-03: approved
- 2022-08-02: received
- See all versions
- Short URL
- https://ia.cr/2022/985
- License
-
CC BY-SA
BibTeX
@misc{cryptoeprint:2022/985,
author = {Roy Rinberg and Nilaksh Agarwal},
title = {Privacy when Everyone is Watching: An {SOK} on Anonymity on the Blockchain},
howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2022/985},
year = {2022},
url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/985}
}
