The sanctions against Tornado Cash, a decentralized currency mixer, continued to ferment, once again pushing the issue of "privacy" in the encryption industry to a hot topic of discussion. Although through decentralized encrypted wallets and applications, users can protect their real identities to a certain extent, but this privacy has also brought regulatory pressure to the entire encryption industry. For example, criminals can use decentralized This is the main reason why the U.S. Department of the Treasury "swings" Tornado Cash.

While supervising and cracking down on illegal transactions, a certain amount of privacy is also required in the encrypted world, just like in real life. For example, no one in the real world wants their financial status, activity track, etc. to be known to others. This is very important for encrypted users. The same applies to . In addition to users’ need for privacy, the same is true for decentralized protocols. For example, the clear and transparent lending situation on the lending protocol chain gives large investors the opportunity to maliciously go short or long, and obtain liquidation proceeds through “fixed-point blasting”.

In recent days, leading DeFi protocols such as dydx, Aave, and Uniswap have successively blocked some wallets related to Tornado Cash, including the wallets of well-known encryption figures such as Shenyu and Sun Yuchen, who were implicated in the anonymous "poisoning". Although Aave has lifted the ban and Unsiwap is banned on the front-end interface, it undoubtedly sounded the alarm for us, showing the importance of privacy protection for users' activities on the chain.

Due to the fact that the data on the blockchain ledger chain can be checked, and the development of related technologies (such as zero-knowledge proof) is not yet mature, and users do not pay enough attention to it, the above-mentioned privacy issues have not been effectively resolved. Compared with other tracks, privacy The overall development of the sector is relatively slow, but from the perspective of institutional financing, the track has been performing well and is favored by top VCs in the circle. For example, the privacy system Espresso Systems completed a US$32 million financing in March 2022 with the participation of Sequoia Capital, and the L2 privacy solution Aztec Network completed a US$17 million Series A financing led by Paradigm in December 2021. Data privacy platform In April 2021, Aleo completed a US$28 million Series A financing led by a16z.

According to the industry's division of privacy tracks, this field can be roughly divided into privacy computing networks (such as Oasis Network, etc.), privacy transaction networks (such as Secret Network, etc.), privacy applications (such as Tornado Cash, etc.) and privacy tokens (such as Zcash etc.), compared with privacy computing, which covers data generation, collection, storage, analysis, utilization, and destruction.

The privacy transaction network is more inclined to protect the privacy of transaction data on the chain, that is, the former is equivalent to a lower-level infrastructure, which can be combined with big data or AI to apply to non-encrypted applications such as medical care. PANews also published a detailed article beforeRepresentative projects of the four major sectors of the privacy track。

Compared with privacy tokens and privacy applications, current encryption users need privacy protection at the level of smart contract applications to prevent the on-chain activities of wallet addresses from being disclosed and tracked, otherwise the incident of "DeFi protocol blocking addresses" may happen again , this article will focus on the ecological development of privacy networks such as Oasis Network, Secret Network, and Aztec. Since the current overall ecological scale is small and still in the "pioneering" stage, this article will focus on Dapps in fields such as DeFi and NFT.

Secret Network

Secret Network was originally named Enigma and planned to be developed in the Ethereum ecosystem. Later, due to performance reasons, it joined the Cosmos ecosystem and became an independent privacy-focused application chain. At the same time, it was renamed Secret Network. On January 20, Secret Network announced the launch of a US$400 million ecosystem fund to strengthen ecological construction. Investors include Alameda Research, Dragonfly Capital, Fenbushi Capital, etc. According to the information on the official website, there are currently about 28 Dapps in the Secret Network ecosystem (including those not officially launched), involving DeFi, NFT, and GameFi, etc. Among them, the ecological native projects are the main ones, and the DeFi sector accounts for about 50% of the entire ecosystem.

DeFi

It is understood that the current Secret ecological DeFi field has officially launched 9 protocols and Dapps, including decentralized exchanges (SiennaSwap, SecretSwap), lending (SiennaLend), liquidity pledges (StakeEasy,), cross-chain bridges (Secret Bridges), Privacy transfer (BlackBox), one-stop DeFi platform (Shade Protocol, BtnGroup), asset management platform (Selenian) and peer-to-peer auction platform (Secret Autions).

According to DeFi Llama data (4 have been included), as of August 15, the TVL of Secret Network is about 11 million US dollars, among which Sienna Network is a protocol focusing on DeFi privacy, and has launched two products, SiennaSwap and SiennaLend. Sienna Network's TVL is about $7.5 million, which is about 62% of Secret Network's entire TVL. SecretSwap is the first anti-frontrunning DEX with privacy protection, and its TVL is close to 4 million US dollars, accounting for about 33% of the entire Secret Network TVL.

In addition, there are some DeFi projects in the testing or development stage, including DEX Polymer.fi, Shinobi for BTC application in Secret Network, Serenity Shield for digital asset protection, DataVault, the first data trading market in the Secret ecosystem, and Privacy Protection Store of value project Amber.

NFT

Stashh is Secret Network's first NFT trading platform, supporting artwork, collectibles, sports, music, videos, etc. Currently, the NFT series with the highest total turnover on the platform isOG Anons, about $1.4 million.

V-IRL is a platform designed to bridge the virtual and real worlds through NFT, that is, users can convert digital NFT into actual items. For example, if a user buys a pair of NFT sneakers on the platform, the user can exchange them for A pair of sneakers in real life.

Legendao is a play-to-mint NFT platform launched by SCRT Labs, which aims to enable users to obtain unique NFT rewards through gamification.

· ActiList is an NFT auction platform, currently in beta version.

In addition to DeFi and NFT, the Secret ecosystem also involves other sectors, such as the game platform onenet., the fighting game Secret Heroes, the multi-role-playing card game Secret Dreamscape, the DAO creation platform SecretDAO, the communication tool Alter, and Fardels, which encrypts transmission content and JACKAL, a distributed storage project with privacy features.

Oasis Network

Oasis Network is an early privacy network, founded in 2018 by Song Xiaodong, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. The network adopts a modular architecture and separates the consensus and smart contract execution layers into a consensus layer and a ParaTimes layer to solve network performance problems. . Oasis Network received early investment from well-known institutions such as a16z, Binance Labs, Polychain Capital, and Pantera Capital. Recently, it announced on May 17 that it has received additional investment of US$35 million from investment institutions such as Newman Capital and Seven X Ventures. The total amount of its ecosystem development funds has accumulatively to $235 million.

Compared with Secret Network, which focuses on protecting the privacy of data on the chain, Oasis Network is continuously cooperating with real-world enterprises to achieve data privacy protection in real life with the help of blockchain technology, as announced by Oasis Network in November 2021 Formed a partnership with Meta to facilitate AI computing applications.

According to the information on the official website of Oasis Network, the fields currently involved in this ecology are mainly DeFi and NFT. Among them, there are about 33 Dapps in the DeFi field, including DEX, lending, income aggregator, oracle, cross-chain bridge, etc., and the head DeFi protocols are all The native project of this ecology.

According to DeFi Llama data (13 have been included), as of August 15, the TVL of the entire Oasis Network is about 30 million US dollars, and the top five applications account for nearly 99%, including 3 decentralized exchanges, 1 lending protocol and 1 yield aggregator. The TVL ranked first and second are DEX ValleySwap and YuzuSwap respectively. The TVL of the former is about 20 million US dollars, which is about 67% of the entire ecology, and the TVL of the latter is about 4.6 million US dollars, accounting for about 15% of the entire ecology. . The third place in TVL is the lending agreement Fountain Protocol, whose TVL is about 4 million US dollars, accounting for about 14% of the entire ecosystem.

NFT

· MetaMirror is the first NFT trading market in the Oasis ecosystem. It currently includes 21 NFT projects. The NFT series with the largest total transaction volume isAI ROSE, about $600,000.

·tofuNFT is a multi-chain NFT trading platform that currently supports 27 blockchain networks, including Ethereum, BNB Chain, Avalanche, Arbitrum, Oasis, etc.

Rosart is an NFT trading platform that has won the Oasis Ecological Accelerator Funding Program. The project is still in the early stages of construction, and currently only the first NFT launch board has been launched.

Aleph Zero

Aleph Zero is a privacy public chain based on Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) technology, which adopts a privacy structure based on ZK-SNARKs cryptography and secure multi-party computation (sMPC). Aleph Zero completed US$14.8 million in financing in November 2021, and then completed a US$1.5 million seed round in January 2022. Investors include Jun Capital, Genblock Capital, Supernova, PetRock Capital, etc.

At present, the Aleph Zero ecosystem is also in the early stage of construction. There are about 12 Dapps in its network, involving DeFi, NFT, oracles, browsers, wallets, identity management, etc., among which DeFi and wallets have a higher weight, about 58%, and DeFi Applications include DEX PanoramaSwap, Common, and lending protocol CLST.

Aztec

Aztec Network is an Ethereum layer-2 solution focusing on the privacy field. It uses the zero-knowledge proof technology zkSNARK to ensure scalability and privacy at the same time. Aztec Network completed a US$17 million Series A financing led by Paradigm in December 2021. Other investment institutions (including other financing rounds) include Coinbase Ventures, IOSG Ventures, Vitalik, etc.

Aztec Network officially launched the main network of Aztec Connect, a bridge that provides privacy protection for DeFi transactions, on July 7. Aztec Connect will allow anyone to pass the bridge contract (the interface that connects Ethereum smart contracts to Aztec’s underlying Rollup technology) or allow developers to People integrate their applications with Connect's software development kit (SDK) to add privacy to Ethereum applications.

At present, only the zk.Money application is launched in the Aztec Network ecosystem. Users can use zk.Money to encrypt transfer data. At the same time, some DeFi protocols have been integrated, including the liquid pledge agreement Lido and the fixed interest rate agreement Element Finance. The interaction of the protocol provides privacy protection, and the top lending protocols Aave and Compound will be integrated in the future.

Findora

Findora is a basic public chain dedicated to solving scalability, interoperability, privacy and other issues. By adopting zero-knowledge proof and secure multi-party computing technology, it can realize the selective disclosure of information and achieve the effect of data privacy protection. Findora announced in August 2020 that it has completed a new round of financing of tens of millions of dollars, led by Polychain Capital. The specific financing amount has not been announced.

Like Oasis, Findora is also an earlier privacy network, but compared with the former, Findora's ecology still has a certain gap. In October 2021, Findora also announced that it will launch a $100 million ecosystem fund to support the Findora-based network. Findora ecosystem research, development, and infrastructure projects for privacy-preserving technologies to "accelerate the growth and development of its community." In addition, Findora also held hackathon activities to speed up ecological construction. For example, on August 5, Findora announced its list of outstanding projects for the "ZK Circuit" hackathon, including hitall.io, a private NFT trading platform, and Forlend, a private lending protocol.

At present, there are about 9 Dapps in the Findora ecosystem, involving DeFi, NFT, cross-chain bridges, wallets, DAO and other fields, of which DeFi accounts for 50%, including lending agreements Poseiden, Forlend, DEX Venice, and Fairswap.

In addition to the above-mentioned privacy public chains with a certain number of Dapps in their ecology, the track also includes many privacy networks that are in the "ecological wasteland" stage, such as Nym, Aleo, Iron Fish, Phala Network, Manta Network, APRA Chain, PlatON, etc. .

Although the current development process of the entire privacy track is slow and the ecological scale is small, some privacy public chains have launched ecological funds or launched hackathons to strengthen ecological construction. For example, Secret Network launched an ecosystem fund of 400 million US dollars, and Oasis Network launched a USD ecological fund and hold hackathons themed on DeFi 2.0, GameFi, and Web3. At the same time, some privacy middleware protocols are also actively promoting ecological development. For example, Automata Network has launched a USD 20 million ecosystem incentive plan. With the further development of the encryption industry, the privacy track may speed up its progress under the comprehensive conditions of the gradual maturity of related technologies, the rapid growth of data on the chain, and the increasing emphasis of users on privacy.