Introduction: A Platform of Decentralized Privacy Coins ▸
Shielding Cryptocurrencies: Turning Any Cryptocurrency Into a Privacy Coin ▸
Trustless Custodians: A Decentralized Approach to Cryptocurrency Custodianship ▸
Sending Cryptocurrencies Confidentially: Ring Signature, Homomorphic Commitment, and Zero-Knowledge Range Proofs ▸
Privacy at Scale with Dynamic Sharding ▸
Consensus: A Combination of iPoS, Multiview-pBFT, and BLS ▸
Multiview PBFT ▸
Incognito Software Stack: Navigating the Incognito Source Code ▸
Incognito Performance ▸
Network Incentive: Privacy (PRV) ▸
User-Created Privacy Coins ▸
Use Cases: Privacy Stablecoins, Privacy DEX, Confidential Crypto Payroll, and more ▸
Future Work: Smart Contracts, Confidential Assets, Confidential IP, and more ▸
Conclusions ▾
We built a new cryptonetwork to provide privacy for other cryptonetworks. To shield cryptocurrencies, we implemented a decentralized group of trustless custodians. To provide privacy, we use the linkable ring signature scheme, homomorphic commitment scheme, and zero-knowledge range proofs. To scale out network performance, we implemented sharding, pBFT, and proof-of-stake.
Incognito has been live on its mainnet since November 2019, with 8 shards powered by 885 validators. An increasing number of shards will continue to scale out the transaction throughput linearly.
Cryptocurrencies are increasing in number every day. Some of them wrap around existing assets like fiat (USDC) and gold (DGX) and make them more efficient. Some of them introduce entirely new asset classes, like programmable governance tokens (MKR). If this development trend continues, as we believe it will, cryptocurrencies are likely to play a very important role in the near future. It is not far fetched to estimate that cryptocurrencies will increasingly compose an individual’s net worth or a company’s balance sheet. Incognito hopes to give these assets and their owners – both now and in the future – the option to claim their right to privacy.
Acknowledgments
We thank 600+ founding nodes for powering the Incognito network since the testnet, Binance for the development grant to build incognito mode for Binance Chain, and members from the wider crypto community for their support, ideas, and encouragement. We’d especially like to thank the thousands of Incognito users who help us improve the network every day.
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