Swirl.Cash to Launch Private Transactions on the Binance Smart Chain

Swirl.cash, a BSC-customized fork of Tornado.cash, which will launch next week on the Wault LaunchPad. Swirl perfects transaction privacy by separating the on-chain link between the recipient and destination addresses.

Introduction

Blockchains are marvelous pieces of system technology, allowing for the trustless, secure, and efficient transfer of data across countless nodes. This is all possible because the data is distributed, making it verifiable, and transparent. Yet, while this transparency empowers the system as a whole, it comes at a great price to the individual user — the lack of anonymity.

On almost all the most populated blockchains, every transaction, every wallet address, every piece of on-chain data is visible to anyone who wishes to see it. That means that as the blockchain, you as an individual are exposed; naked, with your assets written all over you like permanent tattoos. So what can someone do if they wanted privacy? If they wanted to be anonymous? To not be forced to live under a microscope…

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The Swirl Cash Solution

Swirl is a BSC-deployed fork of Tornado.cash, the strongest privacy protocol on the Ethereum network. It uses various cryptographic methods, including implementations of zero-knowledge(zkSnarks) proofs to achieve privacy functionality. So we’ve taken something that works, which allows 100M USD worth of tokens per day to regain their right to anonymity, customized it in Swirl for the current DeFi landscape, and brought it to Binance Smart Chain. Now, Swirl will allow you to send BSC cryptocurrency with 100% anonymity!

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How Does Swirl Achieve Privacy?

Swirl perfects transaction privacy by separating the on-chain link between the recipient and destination addresses. It utilizes a smart contract that accepts BNB deposits from one address and allows a different address to withdraw them. Then, whenever this new address withdraws the BNB, there is no way to link the withdrawal to the deposit, making the process completely private. In other words, Swirl acts as a proxy to ensure that the transaction is 100% anonymous.

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Depositing and Withdrawing

To make a deposit, a user generates a secret and sends its hash (called a commitment) along with a desired deposit amount to the Swirl smart contract. The contract accepts the deposit and adds the commitment to its list of deposits.

Later, that user can make a withdrawal with a different wallet. To do so, the user must provide proof that they possess a secret to an unspent commitment from the smart contract’s deposit list. The zkSnark technology allows doing that without revealing which exact deposit matches the secret. The smart contract will then verify the proof and transfer the deposited funds to the private address specified for the withdrawal. No external observer will be able to determine which deposit this withdrawal comes from.

That’s how it works. Simple, clean, private.

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Additional Privacy Tips

Make sure to follow common privacy guidelines even when using Swirl. Below, we list some of those:

Utilize a VPN or proxies to shield your IP address, and don’t forget to switch your IP addresses between when you deposit and withdraw.

If your browser has it, an incognito tab can be useful.

The secret is like a note that contains data that can be used to link your deposit to your withdrawal. If you wish to allow someone to audit your transactions, you should keep the secret after it is spent. However, in general, to maximize privacy, you would want to destroy the secret.

Clear your cache before withdrawing with a new wallet. Certain platforms or dApps can connect your identity through cookies despite using multiple wallets.

If there is a batch of deposits from one address, and then a batch of the same size of withdrawals to a single address, they are very likely connected. If you need to make multiple withdrawals, try to spread them out and withdraw to addresses not linked with each other.

Мaking deposits or withdrawals only during waking hours of the time zone can reduce your anonymity.

Wait for some deposits to come in following yours. If your deposit and withdrawal are back to back, an observer might guess that they belong to the same person. A good rule of thumb is to wait until there have been at least 5 deposits after yours.

Following up on the previous point, after you deposit, wait until some time has passed before you withdraw. Even if there are multiple deposits following yours, in theory, a malicious observer could have made them while trying to make you believe there have been a large number of deposits from various users. Then, when you withdraw, that user will know it was you. So we recommend waiting at least 24h to be certain there were enough deposits made by multiple people during that time.

Private Transactions on BSC vs. ETH — Are They Any Different?

Many people who utilize the Ethereum blockchain are familiar with its most popular privacy solution: Tornado.cash. This decentralized protocol uses cryptographic methods(zkSnarks) to break the on-chain link between deposit and withdrawal addresses, allowing for anonymous transactions.

Currently supporting over 100M USD-worth of tokens flowing through its privacy funnel every day, Tornado has thus proven the reliability and effectiveness of its implementation over a long time, It has cemented its status as the gateway to anonymity on Ethereum. With the growth of Binance Smart Chain users have wondered — are private transactions on BSC also possible?

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Ethereum vs. Binance Smart Chain

To answer this question, we’d have to first look at the differences between BSC and Ethereum. Although the two chains are almost identical in many ways since BSC is a modified Ethereum fork, one key difference separates them — their validators.

At a high level, validators approve transactions that have been submitted to the blockchain, accepting or rejecting them. On Ethereum, the validators are the miners and are decentralized so once a block is added to the blockchain, it cannot be reverted. Meanwhile, on BSC, all the validators are organized under Binance, creating a theoretical possibility for a transaction to be reverted, rolled-back as if it never happened along with all the others on its block. So, does this mean Tornado-style cryptographic transactions are not possible on BSC? How does having grouped validators affect private transactions?

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Privacy on BSC

Well, the answer to the aforementioned question is — it doesn’t; at least, not directly.

The cryptographic privacy funnel of Tornado.cash is just as effective and foolproof on Binance Smart Chain as it is on Ethereum. Once you make a deposit, the technology will guarantee that your deposit address isn’t connected to your withdrawal address, making the transaction anonymous. This can’t change even if 100% of the BSC validators want it to.

Having said that, it’s true that BSC validators could theoretically revert your transaction, making the funds you sent return to your deposit wallet. Yet, that is extremely unlikely, because, in order to do that, they would also need to revert all the transactions on that block. If you were to then make another transaction, they would have to revert it again, and this cycle could repeat ad infinitum. In simple terms, this impracticality makes this distant possibility move from theoretical, towards impossible.

Such a pattern would pause their entire blockchain for an indefinite period of time, an event Binance would certainly never want to see. That’s also why BSC doesn’t revert the blockchain after major hacks or rug pulls, because the cost isn’t worth it to them. So in the end, the key point of it all, is this — your privacy is still absolute.

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Making Private Transactions on BSC

Although Tornado.cash only operates on Ethereum, luckily, a new solution will soon be available on BSC.

Swirl.cash, a BSC-customized fork of Tornado, will launch next week. Using the same programmatic methods, its implementation will be just as foolproof as Tornado’s is on Ethereum. As such, you can feel relieved knowing an umbrella exists to protect your privacy, preserving it in absolute fashion through powerful cryptography that has stood the test of time.

Source : bsc.news