Will the "NFT Privacy Proposal" posted by V God make it easier for hackers to sell stolen goods?

According to the joint release of Chengdu Lianan and Footprint2022 Web3 Security Research Report, In the first half of 2022, 79 security incidents occurred, and the losses caused by various attacks reached 1.913 billion US dollars. The summer of 2022 was also nicknamed "Hacker Summer".

Homogeneous tokens often enter privacy protocols such as currency mixers after being stolen, while NFTs are relatively difficult to sell after being stolen. First, because each stolen NFT has a "name and surname", victims often Mainstream NFT trading platforms are required to freeze NFTs or prohibit related transactions, and when hackers change hands, anyone can view the transaction information of stolen NFTs in real time through the information on the chain; in addition, there are currently no dedicated privacy tools for NFTs on the market. It makes it difficult to sell NFT.

And on August 4th, the Ethereum Technology Forumethresear.chappeared on theERC721 Extension for zk-SNARKs"Proposal, related discussions continued until August 20th.secondary title

basic introduction

This proposal is an extension of the ERC721 token standard, which hopes to realize the anonymity of NFT transactions, thereby protecting the privacy of NFT transactions. The proposal is implemented by integrating SNARKs algorithm, Merkle tree, stealth address and other technologies. V God participated in the discussion of this topic throughout the whole process. The most recent discussion was V God's reply to the author on August 20.

Briefly explaining how it works, the scheme enables users to receive NFTs without letting other users know; using a stealth address generated from a shared secret between the sender and receiver, the receiver of the transmission is obfuscated, thus protecting NFT transaction privacy.

The proposal is currently in the idea stage, and has not yet gone through the stages of collecting feedback, modifying proposals, and final proposals. It is still far away from the final implementation of token standards, and there are no products directly available to users, but the relevant development tools andCode (open source)More complete and technically capable developers can explore the implementation plan by themselves.

Although the proposal is still in its early stages, the relevant technologies are relatively mature, and it may be easier to develop new products in terms of contract wallets and privacy tools. NFT’s private transactions will undoubtedly unlock the possibility of more NFT games in the future.

Not long after the proposal was put forward, V God also proposed a more lightweight, stealth-based address-based solution.

The difference between the two lies in the degree of privacy. V God’s stealth address-based scheme only hides both parties to the transaction and the transaction amount. This extended proposal also hides the ID of the NFT. The scheme is higher, but the technical difficulty of privacy NFT is more difficult.

The similarity between the two is that the main technical implementation methods are similar, and both parties to the transaction jointly generate a stealth address to protect transaction privacy.

There are other developers in the community who have proposed other development ideas. Some people suggest that privacy NFT is not the NFT standard of Ethereum, but only the standard or function of each contract wallet, which can also realize privacy NFT or NFT transaction anonymity. In a sense, it is equivalent to transferring the work of Ethereum to each Among wallet developers.

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Influence

The privacy of NFTs may have three impacts.

Let me talk about the opposite first,Privacy NFT will be more convenient for hackers to sell stolen goods。The NFT stolen by hackers can be sold anonymously. For buyers, they only know that it is a cheap monkey at 80E, and buyers can continue to resell it anonymously.text

Let's talk positivePrivacy NFT can help holders better prevent fraud.text

Finally, there is a neutral impact. Since privacy NFT has anti-censorship characteristics and is more decentralized, it may promote the development of anonymous organizations. When a user joins an anonymous organization, he needs to express his membership and does not want members of the organization and external observers to know his other identity information. The anonymous organization can protect the privacy of members by sending private NFT.

The organization can create a contract that sends a private NFT to an address submitted by the member, in which the contract owner does not know the identity of the member. And when an organization needs to determine that a member belongs to the organization, the identity of the member can be verified by verifying the private NFT, and no external observers know any information.