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If some currency is going to fly under the radar, it makes sense that a currency for privacy does.
Specter (not to be confused with a separate project called SPECTER), has created two cryptographic tokens – the appropriate-name spectrum token and the xspec token – in 2016, but until now has not received much warning from the crypto community. Sure enough, its tokens rank among the 500 based on the CoinMarketCap data provider, with a total market capitalization of $ 5.7 million – poor of many encrypted standards.
But it may soon change, since the project is taking a growing interest in a technology called staking.
A number of alternative pole test systems have recently been launched (EOS, Tezos, Neo, Tron), with varying degrees of success, although all have commanded large market capitalizations backed by large investors.
These systems assign the task of verifying blockchain transactions to a number of delegates, representatives of genres that are voted by token holders. While token owners do not necessarily identify themselves, according to Mandica, the founder of Specter, there is a huge privacy problem within these systems.
"All UTXOs [unspent transaction outputs] spent to generate bet transactions are trackable on the blockchain and all stake transactions can be linked and your balances are visible to anyone who knows how to analyze the blockchain, "Mandica told CoinDesk.
But the Specter team, which has worked on various privacy tools for blockchain over the last two years, thinks that a way has been found to make stakes even staked.
While the technology is not ready yet, the team has not been reserved for its ambitions.
"From the point of view of the user, you will be able to keep the entire balance of anonymous coins safe from any observer and you will only have to stake out your wallet to receive additional anonymous coins that no one can attribute to you", Mandica said, continuing:
"This is a unique proposal, and no other cryptocurrency, as far as I know, has a system for betting anonymous coins and generating new anonymous coins".
Entropy in open portfolios
While the full picture of how this is not yet clear (the group has not published a white paper, however, on social channels, is promising soon), the basic premise is borrowed from another currency oriented to the privacy: monero, in particular its ring signature technology.
Ring signatures allow anyone in a particular group to sign a transaction, making it impossible to determine exactly which participants' keys signed the transaction.
But this still leaves the nodes, which are not invisible, able to see the transactions. As such, the Specter team went to work on designing a correction.
"Anonymous" coins are created using stealth address technology and single-use key pairs, and [they] they reside on the blockchain as non-linkable UTXOs that can only be spent demonstrating ownership through the use of ringtones and key images based on the Cryptonote protocol, "Mandica said.
Although this is a bit difficult to analyze – and the Specter team has been cautious about explaining too much – there are some clues to what the system entails.
For example, users who contribute to the network by leaving their wallet connected to the Internet can earn a minimum of 5% annual income on their tokens. Even if fewer people have their portfolios open and online, the greater the return (providing an incentive for others to do so).
Mandica refused to explain in detail what these portfolios are doing, but said the "stealth test" algorithm used by the team is designed to exploit the creation of new unprecedented tokens to increase the entropy used to mask real transactions.
He told CoinDesk:
"Entropy is the key to a system that uses ring signatures to create a large pool of" fictitious "mixins or coins that can be used in anonymous transactions protected by ring signing."
Based on other descriptions of the ring signature schemes, the protocols require a steady stream of non-expense transactions to mask real transactions. And this could be what those open portfolios are doing.
Anonymous in the center
According to the team, in its next major release, the new proof-of-stealth staging mechanism for anonymous coins – the currency of the spectrum is the anonymous one – will complete the algorithm of version 3 (PoSv3) of the block-in that the blockchain already uses.
But this work is just the latest privacy tool that the Specter team has invented.
Even those without an unusually high privacy awareness will be familiar with Tor, an acronym for "The Onion Router", a scheme to mask the activity of online Internet users and even access sites that are intentionally invisible to search engines like Google. Specter has already built Tor in its systems and has even gone further, implementing the Tor product, "OBSF4", which allows users to ignore national firewalls, such as those in China and Iran.
The team also works anonymously. In fact, a Spectra spokesperson told CoinDesk that the developers themselves do not even know the real names of the other.
And even if, with this kind of anonymity, it would have been easy to leave, the team did not give up, even when the first token offer (ICO) went bankrupt and its project lacked vitality, while around them crypts some projects without Serious intentions, they have raised millions by selling tokens.
"We started in 2016 with a very unsuccessful ICO that raised only 16 BTCs at a time when the price of BTC was around $ 600- $ 700, so we did not go that far with those funds," Mandica said.
Specter has secured private funding (undisclosed amount) at the start of this year, but the project remains however only an after-hours project for the team. Instead of building with free market monetary encouragement, Mandica and her team are building because they believe in the mission.
And that mission is all one of Crypto's favorite ideas: unbridled privacy.
In a June newsletter, Mandica explains how best to think about the project:
"The best way to understand Spect today is to think of bitcoin + Proof-of-Stake.v3 + anonymous transactions (using technology similar to monero) + Tor to hide your IP."
Image of the Venetian mask through Shutterstock
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