Bitcoin Forum

Today we would like to introduce you to the Maelstrom protocol - the first on chain mixer DApp for Tezos (XTZ). The functionality of the protocol is divided into two user areas: the area for people who want to mix their Tezos anonymously and the area for people who provide liquidity for the protocol.
For a pretty version of this post, head to our Medium post: https://tezosmixermaelstrom.medium.com/maelstrom-first-on-chain-mixer-dapp-for-tezos-xtz-878f125f59ec
To use the service please visit our website: https://maelstrom.fi
You can access the DApp from there.
Follow us on twitter for updates: https://twitter.com/MaelstromMixer
Let's dive into it.




With Maelstrom, the Tezos community finally gets access to an on-chain mixer, which decouples sender and receiver wallets of a Tezos-sending transaction.

1. If an user wishes to mix Tezos, he simply heads to the Maelstrom website and accesses the mixing section within the DApp. He will be prompted with an user-friendly UI, allowing him to specify the amount of Tezos he would like to mix and calculating the network fees for him.

2. After he confirmed the transaction, the user will receive a seed and root pair, which he needs to keep as a secret. Only with those two values he will later be able to withdraw his Tezos.

3. The user can then connect another wallet to the DApp (simply by clicking on the "switch wallets" button). Then he provides the seed, root and the amount he would like to withdraw of his mixed Tezos to the withdraw-UI and confirms the transaction.

4. If he provided a valid seed-root-pair, the protocol will transfer the requested amount of mixed Tezos to the wallet. If he did not withdraw the total balance, he needs to keep the new seed-root-pair, provided by the UI. The old pair will not be working anymore.
By this, each transaction is decoupled from the previous one and there is no logical link between wallets and/or transactions.

Video for the lazy people on the mixing process:
https://vimeo.com/506845539





The Maelstrom protocol allows users to further dilute the transactions of the contract and increasing the privacy for every mixer by this. In return they are entitled to claim shares of the network fees, which the mixers are paying when using the protocol.

1. If an user wishes to provide liquidity, he simply heads to the Maelstrom website and accesses the liquidity section within the DApp. He will be prompted with an user-friendly UI, allowing him to specify the amount of liquidity (in Tezos) he would like to add to the protocol.

1b. Depending on the provided liquidity, the user will be added to a liquidity bracket by the protocol. This will affect the amount of shares and the interval (days) in which he is allowed to claim fees. We will go into detail on this topic after in a few moments.

2. Claiming fees can be done via the DApp again. Once you provided liquidity, it will always display you if you can claim fees - and if not, when you can do so.
The claimed fees will be added to your provided liquidity.

3. We don't want to trap anybody in. Therefore the user can withdraw any amount of his liquidity whenever he feels like it. In addition, the withdrawal of his liquidity can only happen to the wallet he provided it from. So nobody is able to get the users funds as longs as the user is the only one who knows the credentials of his wallet.

Video for the lazy people on the process of how to provide liquidity:
https://vimeo.com/506845484

Liquidity bracket example
All network fees provided by the mixers are accumulated within one big pot. The fees a liquidity provider claims are withdrawn from the pot, the user currently is assigned to. Here is the ratio of the pots:
Bracket 1: 20%
Bracket 2: 33%
Bracket 3: 47%
Brackets an user can be assigned to according to the amount of liquidity he provided to the protocol.

Sum of liquidity provided to reach Brackets:
Bracket 1: 1ꜩ - 50ꜩ
Bracket 2: 51ꜩ -  300ꜩ
Bracket 3: 301ꜩ and more

The amount of fees therefore depends on the bracket he is in. But there is a second variable, which is the ratio of the liquidity he provided to the total liquidity of his bracket. Let's take a look at an abstract example:
We have an user who provided 100ꜩ. The protocol assigned him to bracket 2 and he is allowed to claim fees every two days.
Now two days went by and there are now 1000ꜩ as a total liquidity within the bracket 2. The user can then withdraw:
1 * total share of his bracket * ratio of the liquidity he provided for the bracket
1 * 0.33 * (100/1000) = 0.033 → 3.3% of all fees within the pot

Let's pretend those 3.3% have been 10ꜩ.
After the user claimed those fees, they have been added to his liquidity, leaving him with 110ꜩ. He is still in bracket 3.

How-to-video-guides

Mix Tezos
https://vimeo.com/509169808
https://vimeo.com/509169892

Providing liquidity
https://vimeo.com/509169731

How to claim fees
https://vimeo.com/509169666

Reserve 1

I see a simple of this project but I'm confused by the link. is it not opening or is there something wrong with my network? Or is this not a site that you can access on the internet?

Hey iphone5s,

you are referencing to our video guides. The links are working properly.
I will upload them to YouTube later. maybe this will fix your problem.

Cheers

Tried whole functionality with small amounts. Everything works fine!
Also provided my first XTZ liquidity. Looking forward to claim my first fees in three days :)

Usabilty is quite nice and handling is really easy.

Great Project! Good Luck!

Nice project, is there any plans to open source this like Tornado Cash?

Or is source already available somewhere?

You'll probably end up with a lot more trust and, as a result, business if so.

Additionally, is there anywhere we can view overall stats like total mixes & liquidity?

Cheers Psipherious,

Our contract is open source since launch: https://better-call.dev/mainnet/KT1GH6dUTi2wv2e248Xyvm6VxFtbXbPaBU3Q/code

There is a statistics section on the mixing ui (https://maelstrom.fi/index-mixer-ui.html). It will fetch the live-data directly from the chain once you connected your wallet to the dApp and update the section.

Hope this answers your questions.

Have a good one.

Thank you for your response and it will not be a big problem, interested in looking further than this project. I hope there is something interesting here.

Sure! Feel free to ask any questions that may arise.

We will soon release the V2 of Maelstrom. It will allow you to mix token just the way you are used to mix XTZ with our DApp.