Stratis, a powerful and flexible Blockchain development platform, has announced the Breeze Wallet which is said to redefine transactional privacy in the Bitcoin space and introduce new privacy features.
Chris Trew, founder and CEO at Stratis, chatted with Cointelegraph about the project explaining what makes it so innovative.
According to Trew, privacy protection is a huge issue in the cryptocurrency space:
“The security and the integrity of the system is backed by cryptography, much in the same way that Bitcoin is. The Breeze Wallet will offer its users a level of privacy not available in any existing Bitcoin wallet. It provides an end-to-end privacy solution for Bitcoin and Stratis users, that works with today’s Bitcoin protocol and does not require any forks.”
Moving privacy protection to the next level
Breeze Wallet is indeed a quite ambitious Blockchain project. It is a result of several years of development on various components and features that aim to build a cryptocurrency wallet moving privacy protection to a whole new level, and not only when it comes to making transactions but also when connecting to the network and downloading Blockchain data.
Breeze Wallet combines the innovative TumbleBit solution and privacy enhancements introduced by the Full Block Secure Payment Validation System. Stratis aims to offer a truly trustless and decentralized privacy protocol on the Stratis Blockchain and its private chains while working with financial services regulators to ensure full compliance.
Why TumbleBit?
Trew explained that the TumbleBit solution is indeed the perfect fit for Breeze Wallet. Here’s why. First of all, TumbleBit transactions are truly private and unlinkable, meaning that no participants, including the tumbler, can steal coins. Moreover, no one, including the tumbler, can deanonymize user transactions.
TumbleBit addresses the Bitcoin privacy issue by utilizing off-chain transactions, which cannot be linked by any participant or the Tumble itself. These off-chain transactions do not require any changes to the Bitcoin protocol.
Besides, TumbleBit allows thousands of users to set up payment channels with the same intermediary. Allowing all participants to send Bitcoins to one another through an intermediary. These payment channels between the intermediary and all participants are replaced by sophisticated cryptographic puzzles.
Trew explains:
“If User A can provide the solution to the puzzles, he can claim a Bitcoin. The trick with TumbleBit is that User B buys the answers to these puzzles from the intermediary for a Bitcoin. User A then sends the answer to User B as payment, which User B will accept as one Bitcoin can be claimed. Most importantly, this process is completed utilizing several layers of cryptography. This ensures that the intermediary does not know which solution he sold to which User A, nor do the User A know which puzzle solution they gave to User B. As such, once the users claim their Bitcoins, the intermediary sees that puzzles are solved. But due to the anonymity in numbers, the intermediary cannot link any of the participants to each other.”
Disrupting Bitcoin space
TumbleBit is compatible with the Bitcoin protocol, which makes it the only viable choice for this particular purpose. The Stratis team is hopeful that the deployment of TumbleBit will bring additional benefits for building Bitcoin-to-Stratis exchange protocol making Stratis available to millions of BTC users globally.
Besides, TumbleBit provides significant benefits when it comes to addressing scaling issues, however, the Stratis team preferred not to reveal any details on that matter at this time.
Adam Ficsor, one of the contributors to the TumbleBit research paper and the official implementation of TumbleBit NTumbleBit, is assisting in the development of full block SPV wallet in C#.
Ficsor commented:
“Everyone who is not using Bitcoin Core has already had all their addresses linked together by third parties. This is not a theoretical "assume the worst case" strategy, this is a reality. The third parties are either the central servers your wallet relies on or in the case of SPV wallets, all Blockchain surveillance companies. Bitcoin Core retrieves all the information the Bitcoin network has, thus defeating network analysis attacks.
Of course, running Bitcoin Core is not a walk in the park, a full-block downloading SPV wallet would be a much lighter solution. This is why Bitcoin Core has it in the pipeline and why we are also developing one. Even if you are not interested in using TumbleBit, but you care about your privacy, you should consider changing wallets."
Nicolas Dorier, the developer of NTumbleBit, the official implementation of the TumbleBit protocol, is among the project contributors. Stratis has recently expanded a team of developers to work on this project and to accelerate its development. The first release of the Breeze Wallet is expected within two months.
Once again, Breeze Wallet is an ambitious project but is believed to revolutionize the Bitcoin space and certainly increase the competition on the market of Bitcoin wallets. When released, it will become the first wallet which addresses privacy issues without the need for soft or hard forks.