Introduction https://image.ibb.co/gJoyWS/AZL_mockup_v1.pngWhat is AZULIK ? Azulik aims to be Raiblocks with privacy.
We may make some changes to the Raiblocks protocol, but in the end, we want to offer a decentralised, fee-less, anonymous, and instant cryptocurrency.
At this stage we confirm that Colin's words were right, it's not possible to apply privacy to XRB as we kown it today ( zkSNARKs).
Adding the privacy feature is harder than it may look, simply applying a ZK-SNARKs protocol (the underlying protocol of Zcash) would make the transaction time increase a lot.
That why we are currently working on two approaches:
- Having an optional privacy feature, allowing to have instant transaction or privacy
- WPI (witness-indistinguishable proof ) or recursive zkSNARKs approach which for us would be the best way to have both instant transaction and privacy
See below and our whitepaper for details.
Who are we ? We are two colleagues, two engineers working at a famous tech company. One of our friends in the company will join us in the near future to work on the project management, marketing, and exchange listings.
Here’s a little bit about us:
There is nothing really sexy about it. We are rather young guys who graduated from very good universities. The skinny one is better at C++ than he is with girls and the fat one doesn't remember the last time he played a sport.
You won't know more about us than that, though, because our company's compliance rules don't allow outside of business activities. Hence, we wouldn't take the risk of being fired.
We have been in the blockchain and crypto world for years. We followed the development of XRB and we have been fascinated with Colin's work. Especially
this epic thread that none of us understand…Don't worry, we are joking!
Why Azulik ? We like Colin, he is certainly super smart, but we have read somewhere (and they were reported words) that adding privacy to Raiblocks wasn't possible.
When we saw that, we thought: “Challenge accepted!”
We started to work on it. We dug a bit into the problem and we would like to offer a potential solution we found.
Yes, we aim to build a decentralized, fee-less, and instant cryptocurrency.
But, most of all, we believe that privacy is an amazing touch to add to it.
Give us more details ! In a nutshell we show that applying Zero Knowledge proof (ZK-SNARKs) to DAG is something feasible. At this stage we believe that the privacy feature and instant transaction aren't compatible, however we think about making private transaction an option allowing to handle instant transaction or full privacy. But for sure it's a more complex problem than just apply SNARKs to Raiblocks, our next direction is to check the feasability to apply witness-indistinguishable proof.
A witness-indistinguishable proof (WIP) is a variant of a zero-knowledge proof for languages in NP. In a typical zero-knowledge proof of a statement, the prover will use a witness for the statement as input to the protocol, and the verifier will learn nothing other than the truth of the statement. In a WIP, this zero-knowledge condition is weakened, and the only guarantee is that the verifier will not be able to distinguish between provers that use different witnesses. In particular, the protocol may leak information about the set of all witnesses, or even leak the witness that was used when there is only one possible witness.
Witness-indistinguishable proof systems were first introduced by Feige and Shamir.[1] Unlike zero-knowledge proofs, they remain secure when multiple proofs are being performed concurrently.
(wikipedia)
We believe that applying WIP to Raiblocks could be the solution to have both instant and fee-less transaction. Furthermore given to
Witness-Indistinguishability Against Quantum Adversaries it would also be possible to make Azulik quantum resistant, which is currently not our priority.
For more details check our whitepaper first draft by clicking here. We know it's still very light as we have been mainly working on the privacy feature for the moment but expect updates frequently, it's mainly a summarize of a US army protocol encryption that we have been testing and from the results are below .
UPDATE:
First of all, thank you for all of your messages. They are really documented and very interesting. We will give further details below:
Here are the main results of our simulations. We will try to keep it clear and easy for everyone. Please feel free to ask for further details. The idea here is to test three approaches: ZK-Snarks (3), recursive-ZK-Snakrs (2) (linearisation), and WPI (1).
As a benchmark, we used a simple DAG. We then simulated transactions/nodes and calculated the time needed.
https://image.ibb.co/d3DjA7/1516471445_finalresultsazulik.jpgOn the left, you can see that (among the three approaches) one allows to have transaction time really close to the simple DAG (without privacy). We can confirm these results with the figure on the right where we plotted the difference against the benchmark.
So, here we are, we have selected the Privacy protocol we will apply. We still have some analysis to do, but we are very confident with this approach.
Azulik will be the first Freemium cryptocurrency.
You’ll be able to realise instant, fee-less transactions, and adding privacy will only requiere a very small fee. Read below because what we have to show you is amazing.
First, we need to understand the issue, Raiblocks uses DPOS (delegated proof of stake), hence having complete privacy would hide users’ balances and break the whole DPOS system. The idea is to have two wallets: one public and one private.
So, you are wondering: If I have the choice, I could put all my Azulik in the private wallet and the DPOS wouldn’t work anymore .
Yes, you are right and that’s why we need an intencive to make people stay in the public wallet and participate in the DPOS. All the fees collected through private transactions will be sent back to the user depending on their Azulik balance.
It means that keeping your Azulik in your public wallet, even if you don’t do transactions, will return you a percentage of the daily fees spent on the private network. One percent of the transaction fees will be split between the nodes, hence you will get paid to run the node. The other 99% will be redistributed to the network. Assuming that the portfolio weight is distributed like a Gaussian law and that the number of transactions is equal or higher to the number of users, we can say that, on average, you’ll get 99% of your fees back.
So even if the fee is very low (and probably dynamic depending on the number of nodes on the network), you’ll get back a lot of the fees you pay for you private transactions. Remember, it’s still free and instant to send or receive Azulik with your public wallet.
https://image.ibb.co/dLVmOS/1516527377_azulikproject.jpgThe main upside is that we will have a natural anti-spam protocol for private transactions, hence we can remove the POW to sending or receiving. It also means that it will make transactions even faster so they can be used in the mobile wallet.
Let’s take an example: You reveive your salary in your public wallet, then you send a part of your salary to your private wallet that you call Shopping Wallet.
Usually with Raiblocks, when you pay for a coffee, the bar can check your balance, where the money came from, and so on. Here, you can use you private wallet to pay and nothing will appear. Your transaction will be shown on the public wallet, but there is no link between the public and private wallet so it’s impossible to know who owns any given public wallet.
We believe this is the most elegant way to apply privacy on a DAG DPOS protocol
Do not hesitate to ask all the questions or concerns you may have, we would be happy to provide further details.
To summarise:
- We have designed and tested our privacy protocol
- Azulik will be more decentralized than Raiblocks
- It will be as fast as raiblocks for both private and public transactions
- Engage loyal users with daily rewards
- Very small fee for private transactions
- On average: private transactions are almost free
What next:
Here, you have everything you need to understand Azulik. We know you want a proper whitepaper and to see some code.
We can say that we will be able to deliver a proper whitepaper in about a month. Regarding the code, we will have to find a secure way to show you. As you know, there are other projects aiming to do the same thing and, in months, they proposed/delivered nothing new besides "We will merge Zk-Snarks and Raiblocks.” We like open source projects but we don't want our hard work to be stolen. So, in a bit of time, I think we will have a clearer picture about these two other projects and we will be able to deliver code. However, on our side, we will start implementing Azulik. To be honest, we can't expect the first test to be done before two or three months.
- Finishing a proper whitepaper and public release of the Github the 16th of March
- End of donation the 16th of March
- Wallet development
- Testnet open the first week of april
- Official launch in the begining of May
Distribution:
It's very early to speak about the distribution as we expect months of work ahead, especially because we are busy with our daily work at the office, but we would like to find a very fun, fair, and new way to distribute Azulik. Any ideas?
Can i help ? Of course you can, we are always interested in people having expertise and wanting to share, do not hesitate to contact us and give us your toughs, concerns, comments or complaints. If you have no expertise in this field hence you can motivate us if you are as excited by the project as we are.
Donation: We will update the list (or tell us for remaining anonymous), all donation will be very appreciated and we will remember it when we finally release Azulik! (and we secretly expect to leave our job and work full time on Azulik as it's much more interesting) .
Currently we haven't really dig the distribution process, it's not the top priority as of today. We have to define the supply, the part given to the contributors, the team and through faucet.
We will study all of your propositions, and the preliminary supply will be 666 millions coins.
All of this above isn't definitive and could be updated. Furthermore all donation should be considered as donation nothing more
At the moment, we want Azulik to work as soon as possible.
Thanks for reading.
Azulik Project
