Typhoon Network: Bringing Privacy and Anonymity to Binance Smart Chain

Typhoon Network launches with the goal to package complex privacy-related systems into easy-to-use products and services.

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Privacy and blockchains

Blockchains are designed to be highly distributed systems – each node has a complete history of everything that happened on the network and can verify the state of the entirety of the system independently. This is fantastic because it makes everything transparent and robust.

On the flipside, with transparency comes a lack of privacy, as every transaction you ever made is also recorded publicly on all nodes on the network. Anyone can see: 

– what any person did

– the exact time they did it

– to whom they sent money to

– what contracts and apps they interacted with

– what tokens they own, and the balances of each, at any point in time

Leaving such a big online footprint is just not ideal.

Where Typhoon Network Comes in

Typhoon Network’s solution to this problem is to facilitate transactions between users, without actually linking the involved wallets on-chain together. Instead, Typhoon Network itself becomes the middleman for transactions: Alice deposits some funds into Typhoon, Bob withdraws some funds out of Typhoon. No link between Alice and Bob exists.

If an observer is taking interest in a user’s transaction, all they will be able to see are transactions related to the Typhoon smart-contracts, and that’s all. Where those funds originate from or where a transfer ends up going is private and unknown. Like a dead-end.

Complex Cryptography Made Easy

The backbone of Typhoon is a cleverly designed zero-knowledge cryptography called zkSNARK (famously utilized by tornado.cash on Ethereum which serves as prior-art to Typhoon). The great thing about zero-knowledge is that it’s… zero-knowledge (duh)! No information that can link a deposit to a withdraw is recorded on-chain, so even investigating the Typhoon contracts itself won’t give any information to figure out what went where.

This complex technology is packaged up into a neatly designed system without compromising on functionality; upon depositing into Typhoon, the user submits part of a randomly generated piece of text with its submission. This piece of text (resembling a private key) can then be used on a different wallet by a different user to get the funds out of the contract again.

Imagine something like a bucket of coins – when putting a coin into the bucket, the user gets a note back that states “owns a coin in this bucket”. User 1 can then give this note to a different user who decides to use this note to take a coin out again. Besides being able to take out a coin from this bucket, the user has no idea who put this coin in the first place.

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The Typhoon Networks Vision

Typhoon Network’s vision is to build an ecosystem around privacy – everyone should be entitled to it whenever they want to. It shouldn’t be necessary to jump through complex hoops or follow an involved checklist of points just to do so. Neither should it be locked behind expensive fees, discouraging usage altogether.

At Typhoon Network, we want to update the core of how people interact with blockchains to directly involve more privacy. Even simple interactions like using a smart contract should have an option to be private, and so should payments for goods.  Enabling privacy should be as easy and as accessible as any other action.

But we also fundamentally believe that there is no single facilitator of privacy and that achieving our vision involves the collaboration of multiple players and partners (hence the name ‘Network’).

The Role of the TYPH Token

Typhoon Network launched with the TYPH token, a piece in our vision to achieve this ecosystem. The token is our tool to encourage user involvement in building out the network vision and turning privacy into a community-driven effort.

TYPH has a max supply of 20,000,000 tokens and it’s involved wherever community participation in the protocol occurs. This is integrated without making it a requirement for users that just want to enjoy more privacy.

When fully established, TYPH will be used to

– govern the protocol and propose future development strategies

– participate in community-related developments such as hosting a transaction relayer and earning fees through Typhoon

– make transactions through typhoon even cheaper for power-users and partners

– make it possible for token holders to directly earn a share of the fees that accumulate

– as rewards to encourage users to provide funds to the typhoon anonymity set and make the protocol more private

The initial token allocation was put into circulation on March 26th through a 400% oversubscribed IFO. The tokens were sold at a price of fifty cents. More tokens are being released over time to users of the service through liquidity incentives and staking.

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Why Use Typhoon?

Typhoon is built with privacy and user trust at heart. We’re constantly trying to find new ways to improve the core experience, but are also doing well within the current BSC ecosystem itself:

– Low fees – We take only 0.1% of the transaction as fees for using the service. This is 10x less than any other service available.

– Relayer functionality – We have recently released relayer functionality that allows the same user to make both the deposit and the withdrawal, while still remaining anonymous. This makes it possible to send funds to a new wallet without first seeding it with BNB (seeding it makes it hard to remain anonymous) for the transaction fee. Typhoon is currently the only service on Binance Smart Chain enabling extra privacy through relaying.

A Storm is Coming to BSC

Typhoon is ramping up and aims to become a staple in the BSC ecosystem. Thanks to the successful IFO, the team is now able to work on bringing the Typhoon Network vision to reality.

The BSC privacy scene is changing and evolving, users are becoming more aware of their online footprint, and the need for anonymity increasing. Typhoon Network is excited to be a part of the privacy revolution.

Source : bsc.news