Justin Sun Announces Beta-Testing of TRON Shielded Transactions

On December 17, 2019, decentralized web blockchain project TRON CEO Justin Sun, tweeted that the initiative is set to beta-test its shielded transactions which hide the sender and receiver’s addresses, transaction input and output, and the amount transacted.

TRON Jumping on the Privacy Bandwagon

Despite global authorities showing apprehension toward privacy-centric digital currencies, a number of cryptocurrency projects have shown their inclination toward embracing privacy and anonymity.

The latest entity to join in the privacy cryptocurrency bandwagon is TRON, the 12th largest cryptocurrency by market cap according to data from CoinMarketCap.

In a tweetstorm on December 17, 2019, Sun made a number of announcements with regard to the upcoming privacy features of TRX. Sun stated that TRON will soon begin beta-testing its shielded transactions which hide various details associated with a blockchain transaction.

https://twitter.com/justinsuntron/status/1206878713230417921

Sun said that shielded transactions use zk-SNARK (Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge) to enable a completely anonymous and shielded transaction. Zero-knowledge proofs rely on a set of public parameters, Sun noted.

The TRON CEO added that the organization is using a multi-party computation (MPC) protocol to construct these parameters in a transparent and secure manner. The parameter’s strong safety will safeguard them from malicious attacks from shielded transactions.

Sun added that the MPC protocol’s design only requires one participant to be honest in order to protect the integrity of the aforementioned parameters. He added that the protocol is also highly-scalable which allows the participation of as many users as time allows.

Lastly, Sun said that TRON’s privacy-enhancement beta-features are open to developers all across the globe and that they can contribute to the project’s github to make their efforts count.

Privacy Coins Continue to Build

As global concerns surrounding data privacy continue to mount, various privacy-focused cryptocurrency projects have been burning the midnight oil to make their offerings more comprehensive and secure in nature.

As reported by BTCManager on December 11, 2019, the Zcash Foundation in collaboration with Electric Coin Co. had launched the Blossom hard fork to bring greater scalability, capacity, and speed to the ZEC blockchain network.

Notably, zk-SNARKs being used by TRON now were initially developed by the Zcash Foundation to bring an enhanced degree of privacy to the altcoin’s transactions.