A partnership between privacy-focused project Nym and Zcash was recently announced. This partnership aims to address some of the persistent issues in the sector to enhance user protection and data privacy in the Zcash ecosystem.
Data leaks, a difficult problem
Electric Coin Company (ECC), the organization behind Zcash, is collaborating with Nym, a privacy-preserving blockchain project focused on enhancing data confidentiality. The collaboration is made possible through Zcash Community Grants (ZCG), as the project team announced on their X (formerly Twitter) account.
This partnership aims to solve challenging user protection issues by integrating Nym’s mixnet into the Zcash ecosystem. Integration with the Zcash light client library allows wallet developers to implement the privacy protections of the Nym mixnet at their discretion.
1/6 🎉 Nym is pleased to announce a grant from Zcash Community Grants to enhance the privacy of Zcash users by integrating the Nym mixnet with Zcash and protecting against metadata leaks.
— nym (@nymproject) February 13, 2024
As explained in the announcement, the goal is for the integration process between Nym and Zcash to bridge the gap in the network layer. This gap allows the metadata of user transactions to be tracked, makes data vulnerable, and creates privacy concerns for users, as the post explains.
A powerful attacker could analyze traffic patterns, such as the TCP/IP packet stream used to submit transactions, which could de-anonymize the user. ISPs can passively log Zcash activity by snooping on traffic patterns. And the growing cryptocurrency surveillance industry can not only passively monitor P2P traffic, but also conduct active attacks.
Nym will work with Zcash’s existing privacy infrastructure to “help provide an end-to-end protection solution for users’ privacy. Zcash uses zero-knowledge proofs to protect transaction privacy, but “even advanced privacy features, such as Zcash’s auto-protection feature, leave the network vulnerable later on.”
Nym Mixnet encrypts user data into Sphinx packets and distributes them across global ‘mix nodes’, making metadata patterns untraceable and ensuring online privacy, preventing government, corporate and criminal surveillance attackers from tracking metadata. This is a technology to prevent it.
Mixnet achieves this by splitting data into equally sized encrypted Sphinx packets and distributing them over three hops, creating ‘mixing nodes’ at randomly spaced intervals around the world. Next, mixnets further complicate tracking by shuffling dummy ‘cover’ traffic. Together, these features make it impossible for even a powerful attacker with a global view of the network to track metadata patterns.
A Shared Vision: Privacy for All
Nym and Zcash are privacy-focused projects that protect users’ rights to their personal information and transaction data. “This is an alienable right to a life of dignity, free from gross infringement and interference,” said Harry Halpin, co-founder and CEO of Nym Technologies.
Halpin also commented on the state of the digital sphere as it relates to privacy issues. The CEO believes that intrusions and interference are ‘normal’ but something needs to change. “With this groundbreaking integration, Nym and Zcash are working to make real online privacy a reality,” he concluded.
Josh Swihart, CEO of ECC, expressed a positive outlook on the partnership, reaffirming that network-level privacy has been “the missing piece since the inception of Zcash.” He believes that coming together the privacy ecosystem will only “deepen protections for the financial privacy of average users.”
Global regulators have scrutinized privacy-focused projects and accused them of encouraging criminal activity. Last year, it was announced that Zcash (ZEC) would be delisted from Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, in four European countries, along with other privacy coins such as Monero (XMR). Likewise, Binance recently announced plans to delist Moreno in the US due to regulatory pressure.
ZEC is trading at $20.71 in the hourly chart. Source: ZECUSDT on tradingview.com
Featured image from Unsplash.com, chart from TradingView.com
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