As more government agencies start mining data on various blockchain networks, those who wish to remain anonymous are increasingly turning to privacy-focused networks. In a bid to give developers a privacy-focused network to build dApps on, Particl has been hard at work integrating the best features from a number of blockchain networks into one epic privacy-focused network.
Earlier this week, Particl successfully completed a hard fork that led to the integration of RingCT and Bulletproofs in a bid to make the network as private as possible while reducing transaction fees to the bare minimum.
What is RingCT?
RingCT was made popular by Monero back in January 2017, helping it to become the most privacy-focused cryptocurrency on the market at the time. RingCT works by taking a sender’s transaction, mixing it with other outputs from the network and creating a unique key image. This makes RingCT transactions virtually impossible to track back to the original sender, as all inputs to the final transaction look identical. The role of key images prevents users from double-spending as miners maintain a full list of every key image ever created.
By deploying RingCT into its network, Particl users can ensure that their transactions and interactions with dApps on the network are totally secure, with nobody being able to snoop on your activity. This comes in handy when you’re trying to remain anonymous or conduct private matters on the blockchain network – such as banking and transacting. However, the one drawback of RingCT on Particl is that bad actors – such as terrorists – could create a messaging dApp that uses the RingCT feature. This would in turn prevent government agencies from being able to detect and stop the threat.
Making Transactions as Cheap as Possible
If we’ve learned anything from Ethereum, dApps can jam networks with spam traffic and force the transaction fees higher and higher. With the goal of keeping transaction fees as low as possible, Particl has also added in Bulletproofs. Bulletproofs work by utilizing zero-knowledge short proofs to cut down the space taken up on the blockchain by removing large snippets of useless signatures. Compared to regular range proofs, Bulletproofs can cut the average transaction fee by 70%. Back in October 2018, we also saw Monero add Bulletproofs to its network which cut transaction fees by 96% in practice. If Bulletproofs can save somewhere in the range of 70% and 96%, Particl should enjoy a nice boost in users.
Particl is paving the way for privacy-focused dApp communities and is making life for developers easier than ever. By using the latest Bitcoin codebase rather than the Cryptonode codebase, developers can quickly and easily build their dApps owing to the flexibility. These two new upgrades will certainly be a big draw for dApp developers, and we could very well see network traffic on Particl increase over the next few weeks.
