The development team behind zcoin,
a privacy-focused cryptocurrency built on the same Zerocash protocol that
underlies zcash, has announced a project to create a decentralized coin mixer
for ether transactions.
Revealed in a post on the zcoin blog published
4th May, the idea is to create an ethereum-compatible version of the
verifications proposed in the Zerocash
protocol that allows users to convert non-anonymous
cryptocurrency (bitcoin, ether etc) into an anonymous token.
The idea is that these tokens could be sent to another user,
converted back into the base currency and spent without revealing the private
token's owner.
Running such a system on ethereum opens up the possibility of
both leveraging the platform's smart contract functionality and eliminating the
need for a trusted third party to handle the mixing, as is currently the case
with bitcoin mixers.
As the zcoin post explained:
"Unlike Coinjoin
and its variants, it also does not require a central server to process such
mixing, does not require you to trust any third parties and does not require
other users to provide liquidity for a mixing transaction."
While the highest levels of anonymity in the cryptocurrency
space are currently associated with standalone currencies such as zcash, dash
and monero, the zcoin mixer is representative of a small but growing trend in
privacy projects focused on ethereum.
Another such example, ZoE (Zcash on ethereum),
similarly showed that there are fruitful avenues to explore in bringing
anonymity technology to the distributed computing platform.
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