With Cardano introducing Midnight, a privacy-focused sidechain, and emphasizing privacy as a critical component for blockchain adoption, especially in real-world applications, it’s time for the Polkadot community to discuss our approach to privacy:
Should Polkadot develop its own privacy features in-house, or is there merit in integrating with existing privacy protocols like @nym?
What are the benefits and drawbacks of each approach?
Would leveraging a parachain for privacy be a viable strategy for Polkadot, enhancing interoperability while specializing in privacy?
How does Polkadot’s existing infrastructure support or hinder the integration of robust privacy solutions?
Considering Polkadot’s vision of interoperability, how might a native privacy solution or integration with protocols like @nym affect our ecosystem’s growth and security?
Looking forward to insights from developers, privacy advocates, and the broader Polkadot community on how we might navigate this crucial aspect of blockchain technology.
I see many reasons to use NYM, but lets be clear about its scope: It just enhances privacy on the network layer. If you query API’s through NymVPN you still tell the endpoint all your metadata secrets - like the public keys for the balances you’re interested in.
As for In-House solutions, I suggest you check out Incgonitee by Integritee which already features private transfers of DOT and TEER as well as private messaging. Moreover, it has private swaps and private OpenGov voting on its roadmap.
Parachains are very transparent by design as they need to share their PoV with relaychain validators transparently. Even previous attempts to use ZK for token transfers have shown to leak sensitive information - in the case of Calamari the fees had to be paid transparently on L1 therefore it was probably more like a PoC for ZK. I’m not saying it can’t be done. But I see little to no momentum to do this properly on Polkadot.
Polkadot should certainly not spend time watching at what Cardano is doing, and maybe spend time at what other top ecos with usecases are doing, like Eth l2’s, Cosmos SDK chains, upcoming Avalanche L1.
And some of them are certainly building privacy related tooling, which for some reason I don’t see much in Polkadot.
But as of now, this seems just as speculation, and until Parity or a big team comes to build in Kusama I don’t this moving forward. To build something things at Kusama protocol level, like @brenzi identified, and there’s not so many that can do this.
As far as I’ve seen, much of Avalanche and Cosmos design is based to have separate DA which allows for enterprise / private bloockchains to exist. If Kusama can have shared security + privacy, that would be amazing, but i’m not technical enough to know how.
Sharded blockchain for private networks would be next level and probably only in the market.