It is ironic that blockchain was created for the sole purpose of convenience, fairness and Anonymity( and not in that order) but with all the numerous blockchain project popping up everyday, many of them has been straying from the fundamentals of blockchain technology and some of them even go as far as bribing users to provide the or personal information and I won't mention names(Cough Cough Blockchain wallet)... so imagine my joy when I stumbled upon a project that is solely focused on protecting our privacy.
The Veil Project is a privacy coin with the motto, “privacy without compromise.” It was created to grant users the ability to remain incognito while engaging in transactions on the blockchain. Before we delve into the specifics of Veil, we will first cover the privacy protocol it uses, known as the Zerocoin protocol.
The protocol was devised back in 2013 by John Hopkins University professor Matthew D. Green and his graduate students Ian Miers and Christina Garman. The aim was to create an extension for Bitcoin which offers optional anonymity in the Bitcoin network.
The process involves converting public Bitcoins into anonymous Zerocoins and back again. The public token is referred to as a Basecoin, while the anonymous coin is known as a Zerocoin. For Veil, the public token is called Basecoin Veil and the anonymous coin is dubbed Zerocoin Veil.
However, rather than use the word ‘public,’ Veil use ‘on-chain’ because their Basecoin transactions are also made anonymous. Veil want to give users the functional ability to convert crypto into Zerocoins and then spend them at a later date entirely anonymously.
But, in Bitcoin for example, to ensure the monetary supply can be audited, the creation of a Zerocoin cannot be fully anonymous. This is because of a process known as ‘minting,’ which refers to when a Zerocoin is created. However, to mint a Zerocoin, a Bitcoin (public token) has to be taken out of the total supply to be ‘burnt.’
Ring Confidential Transactions (RingCTs) are also used by Veil to further increase anonymity. RingCTs are added to Basecoin transactions to bring as much anonymity as the technology currently allows for.
Alongside this, Bulletproofs technology has also been adopted to help reduce transaction sizes. Eventually, the Veil network will implement a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus algorithm to ensure maximum decentralisation and energy efficiency. But, for at least its first year, the Veil network will be using a hybrid approach with Proof-of-Work (PoW) mining. However, since it is a hybrid approach, it will also have PoS benefits.