Author | Qin Xiaofeng

Editor | Hao Fangzhou

Produced | Odaily

Author | Qin Xiaofeng

Editor | Hao Fangzhou

Produced | Odaily

As the most important feature of the blockchain, transparency and openness have always been highly sought after.

However, in the process of blockchain mainstreaming, there is a contradiction between openness and transparency and the privacy required by reality, and the privacy problem is becoming more and more prominent. Therefore, a large number of privacy projects have been born in the market, focusing on breaking through various privacy protection technologies such as currency mixing and zero-knowledge proof.

Recently, Odaily came into contact with a project called ZKCHAOS. Compared with other competing products, the biggest feature of ZKCHAOS is that considering the importance of traffic, they first adopted the solution of a fair game platform, which is also the Dapp direction with the most active public chains before, so as to achieve privacy protection. In addition, ZKCHAOS provides high-performance anonymous transactions for multi-chain token holders based on ZK-Rollup technology (Layer 2), and ZKCHAOS transactions do not require high Gas fees.

Privacy and layer2 track are becoming hot fields at present. Can the unique ZKCHAOS seize the opportunity and open up a new situation by riding the wind?

1. The privacy track that balances transparency and opacity will usher in an outbreak

Today, Decentralized Finance (DeFi) is booming, and the value locked on the chain has exceeded 110 billion US dollars. But there is still a long way to go before it truly enters the mainstream world. Privacy issues are one of the important reasons preventing DeFi from going mainstream.

When CeFi dominated the mainstream, most user assets were stored in centralized exchanges or wallets, and asset information was relatively privately protected. However, with the rise of DeFi, many users began to manage their own assets in decentralized wallets and interact with various smart contracts. In a fully transparent and open world like DeFi, what assets do players hold, what transactions have they made, and how much is their holding cost... All data is open, and user privacy is not guarded, and they are always exposed to risks.

In traditional financial markets, financial institutions such as banks must take responsibility to protect users' financial data. In addition, legislators in various countries have also introduced many privacy laws, requiring major commercial organizations to protect user privacy and avoid privacy leakage.

Privacy is a fundamental right and all financial services should respect the ownership of personal data they serve. However, the openness and transparency of DeFi seem to be contradictory to privacy protection, which also makes it difficult for DeFi to be promoted and adopted in the traditional world. Solving the privacy problem can promote the in-depth development of DeFi.

"In traditional finance, it is impossible for a third party to have the right to view other people's asset transaction information without authorization, but this aspect is blank in the blockchain world. Privacy must be just needed, and privacy protection should be a blockchain One of the underlying functions.” ZKCHAOS team leader James told Odaily.

In January of this year, Grayscale founder Barry Silbert issued a post saying that 2021 will be a year of privacy protection, decentralization and resistance to censorship, and the privacy track will usher in a big explosion.

At present, a large number of projects have been born on the privacy track. If classified according to the means of privacy realization, there are mainly the following types: one is zero-knowledge proof, the representative projects are Horizen and Zcash; the other is the mixed currency of the fund pool, which represents the project Tornado.Cash; It is DASH; the fourth is the ring signature, representing the project XMR; the fifth is MimbleWimble, representing the projects Grin and Beam.

However, in James' view, the aforementioned privacy projects are more or less flawed and insufficient. Taking XMR as an example, this type of anonymous currency basically builds its own public chain ecology, without user ecology, and without asset lock-up. It can only anonymously process a transaction initiated at that time, but cannot protect the ERC20/BEP20 held by the user. The privacy of token assets. "What is really needed should be a privacy protocol that can provide services for various public chain ecologies, rather than trying to make users abandon Ethereum and use anonymous coins instead, which is unrealistic."

As a privacy transaction protocol, ZKCHAOS is not intended to create a so-called brand-new ecology, but to provide privacy protection services for the ecology with users and assets. Users can use ZKCHAOS in any public chain ecology such as Ethereum, and will not be limited. . Therefore, in terms of scope of application alone, ZKCHAOS seems to be more in line with future development trends.

2. ZKCHAO realizes privacy protection with the help of game traffic cover

On the track of privacy transaction protocol, not only ZKCHAOS, Tornado.cash, Findora, Mask and other projects are all strong competitors on this track. So, which anonymous transaction solution is better?

For an excellent anonymous transaction solution, the first element is the volume of unidentified transactions. The larger the volume of unidentified transactions, the harder it is for anonymous transactions to be discovered. Technology is a necessary condition, but not a sufficient one. Only when a solution can create high-frequency transactions for no apparent purpose while maintaining their anonymity, is it a good anonymous transaction solution.

For example, if you want to walk on the road without being recognized, the easiest way is to wear a mask. For better camouflage, you can wear a wig or tuck something into your clothes to hide your body shape. But if you are the only one wearing a mask on this road, it will be extraordinarily abrupt, because only you are different from others. Best of all, most of the people on the street are masked, so it's easier to hide yourself among them.

Back to anonymous transactions, anonymous technologies (zero-knowledge proofs and ring signatures) are disguised props. Even if the camouflage skills are superb, it is difficult to truly achieve the effect of anonymity, and instead expose the transaction target.

The solution proposed by ZKCHAOS is to first use the traffic brought by the game platform and all tools that can increase the transaction volume to cover the transaction, so as to achieve the purpose of anonymity and privacy protection to the greatest extent.

"Privacy technology is like a mask. The more advanced the technology, the more advanced the mask. Technology is very important, but technology alone cannot achieve perfect privacy protection. Traffic is actually more important than technology. This is why ZKCHAOS is on Layer2 Build a game platform, because it can directly bring traffic. If it is just a scene of anonymous transactions, it is very low frequency." James explained.

The biggest feature of ZKCHAOS is to use game traffic to mix coins, and it is also established from the perspective of business logic. However, for this model to succeed, there are two very critical elements: the traffic must be large enough, and the purposes of gamers must be more diversified. If the traffic is not large enough, the mixed currency pool is basically useless; if the player comes from a single source, it is easier to be monitored and observed, and it cannot play a good role in anonymity. To achieve these two points, the key is inseparable from the attractiveness of the game and the diversification of types and gameplays. This is why ZKCHAOS builds a game platform. "ZKCHAOS is not only an anonymous transaction protocol, but also an interesting game platform. A large amount of transaction volume is provided by real players on the platform."

For example, in Mecha Lotto, players can collect NFT props bonus system, and get double cards or guarantee cards for free. After using the double cards, your rewards will be doubled when you win the game, and the guarantee cards are when you lose the game. When the principal is paid. Through multiple ways of playing, the playability of the game can be increased, and the interactivity of transactions between players can be increased. In addition to players and anonymous traders, there is also a banker in the game, that is, the role of miners, who will participate in investing in the total prize pool and betting with players. This will preserve the fun and competitive part of traditional games, while being fairer to the average player.

According to official information, ZKCHAOS currently supports multiple gameplays such as single player game & NFT system, multiplayer game & invitation system, investment mining, etc. A series of product designs are designed to ensure that people may participate in the game at any time in different time zones around the world, providing traffic cover for anonymous transactions.

3. Based on Layer2, taking into account scalability and privacy

Unlike transactions, games, as a non-financial application scenario, have higher requirements for the underlying performance of the blockchain.

However, the main direction of many public chains headed by Ethereum is financial applications. In the face of more frequent non-financial applications, especially for information storage and game applications that require more frequent user interaction, the interaction cost is too high. , user experience will also be affected. However, if you abandon Ethereum and develop the underlying infrastructure yourself, it will not only be time-consuming and laborious, but it will also be difficult to obtain high-quality user resources on Ethereum. Therefore, the Layer 2 expansion solution has become an important option.

In order to meet the huge game demand on the game platform, ZKCHAOS adopts ZK Rollup's Layer 2 expansion solution to provide a high-performance mixer for token holders on multiple chains. The official claims that transactions on ZKCHAOS require almost no Gas fees .

There are many Layer 2 solutions in the market, what are the advantages of ZK Rollup? Why does ZKCHAOS prefer ZK Rollup?

• An important reason is that ZK Rollup is close to Layer 1 in terms of security. For ZKCHAOS, which has a huge demand for currency mixing, security issues are naturally the top priority. In addition, in terms of finality, ZK Rollup also has certain advantages over Optimistic Rollup. ZK Rollup can achieve finality within a few minutes, and it supports the rapid withdrawal of funds to Layer 1; while the competing product Optimistic Rollup has a dispute delay design , generally takes at least a week.

• Next, let's briefly explain the principle: when you withdraw assets from the Layer 2 wallet, you need to complete the two steps of asset encryption and extraction. After completing the first step, after encrypting part of the assets, you will get a license Withdraw the "receipt" of this amount of assets; in the second step, you can enter the "receipt" and "payment address" in the withdrawal panel, and the assets corresponding to the "receipt" can be withdrawn anonymously to the specified address; or, you can directly Send the "note" to anyone who needs to accept this asset anonymously, and the other party can directly proceed to the second step, thereby achieving anonymous transactions during the withdrawal process.

• In terms of specific implementation steps, ZKCHAOS will deploy a zero-knowledge currency mixing protocol on Layer1. When users need to withdraw funds from Layer2 to Layer1, the protection of user privacy will be realized through this protocol. Therefore, ZKCHAOS will consist of three parts: the contract, the off-chain part, the zero-knowledge proof circuit and the zero-knowledge mixing protocol:

The main functions of the zero-knowledge proof include: generating proofs for the recharge and withdrawal of users on L1 and all behaviors of users on L2.

Four. Summary

In addition to working hard on performance, ZKCHAOS has also reached a cooperation with ChainSwap, a cross-chain asset bridge, to actively explore cross-chain privacy protection. In addition, ZKCHAOS will explore solutions for building multi-chain NFT and game platforms in the future.

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Four. Summary

Layer2+ privacy, supported by two popular concepts, ZKCHAOS is also favored by many institutions in the capital market.

Recently, ZKCHAOS announced that it has completed the seed round and strategic round of financing with high oversubscription. The total of the two rounds of financing is 1.5 million US dollars. The financing is led by NGC Ventures and Spark Digital Capital. Privacy protection issues, in addition to expanding the team and pursuing opportunities to develop complex ZKP tracks.