Introduction & objectives

Across the landscape of privacy-focused cryptocurrencies, a number of general approaches have been taken, each with its own benefits and trade-offs.

The Veil Project is working to improve the state of privacy-focused cryptocurrencies by creating a secure, highly anonymous coin that provides full-time privacy. In addition, Veil offers a user experience suited to the masses with self-funding to support long-term research and development by a dedicated team of researchers and blockchain developers.

This document introduces the project, its technologies and its approach to long-term sustainability.

Original technology

In its first implementation, Veil combined the world’s most secure blockchain software, Bitcoin version 0.17.1, with the cryptography-based privacy protocol, Zerocoin and the Particl project’s RingCT implementation.

Over a decade in operation, the Bitcoin core software has demonstrated itself to be the most secure and battle-tested blockchain software in existence.

In order to provide for “always-on” privacy, Veil added RingCT privacy from Particl to its Basecoin transactions, such that all transaction components in the Veil network are as anonymous as technology today can provide for.

The Zerocoin protocol is based on zero-knowledge proofs , a cryptographic method which allows a computation to be proven to have taken place, without knowledge of its inputs and outputs. In the case of a cryptocurrency, this computation would be a value transaction, in which the sender, receiver and amount transacted can remain anonymous.

Support for the Dandelion protocol makes it nearly impossible to trace a transaction back to its source node on the network.

Finally, Bulletproofs technology will be adopted to ensure minimal transaction sizes.

Zerocoin to RingCT-staking to Supersonic

Half a year after the launch of Veil in 2019, a series of vulnerabilities were discovered in the Zerocoin library which sits at the core of most Zerocoin-based protocol implementations, including Veil’s. After review, and community discussion, the Veil project, along with a number of others, concluded that Zerocoin can not be relied upon to form the anonymity core of the protocol, and began a three step transition to a new core foundation:

Securing the known Zerocoin vulnerabilities — In order to immediately protect Veil user funds, the project released an update that preserves the functional characterics of Zerocoin, but removes its unlinkability to original mints. Zerocoins minted in Veil from RingCT, still carry the anonymity inherent in RingCT, and so during the interim Veil users have some level of anonymity in spending and staking with Zerocoin if originally minted from RingCT. RingCT staking — The second step, planned for Q1 of 2020, will be to deprecate Zerocoin altogether in a protocol update that, as an industry-first, provides for staking of RingCT. During this phase, RingCT will form the core privacy foundation of Veil. Supersonic — The Veil mathematics and cryptographic team are presently validating research that should lead to a late-2020 transition to our ultimate protocol based on Supersonic, first practical, trustless, and efficiently verifiable zero-knowledge proofs, which are smaller than 10 kilobytes and take only milliseconds to verify even for the most complex statements.

Consensus algorithms

The Veil network operates a hybrid Proof-of-Work (PoW) and Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus system.

The Proof-of-Stake consensus system ensures maximum decentralization, energy efficiency and provide a mechanism for all Veil holders to earn rewards in Veil through the process of staking.

The Proof-of-Work mining system, guarantees a fair distribution of the coin, avoids the necessity of an ICO or pre-mine, and adds security to the overall network. To promote fairness of mining, Proof-of-Work mining will utilize the ASIC-resistant X16RT hashing algorithm, an improved version of X16R introduced by the Ravencoin project.

User experience

Veil places great emphasis on user experience, and in this regard will support a number of experiential benefits.

For example, to avoid the necessity of file backups, the Veil wallet supports a single BIP-0039/BIP-0044 Deterministic Seed from which its entire wallet can be restored, including both Basecoin and Zerocoin transactions.

And beginning with the RingCT protocol release, Veil will release a wallet that’s been designed and built from the ground-up with an emphasis on a friendly user experience.

The Veil emission schedule

As summarized in the table, the Veil coin emission schedule includes:

A declining and capped contribution to the founder , to recover the seed investment from which the project has been bootstrapped.

A declining but uncapped contribution to the Veil Labs , to provide for ongoing research and development in privacy technologies related to cryptocurrencies.

A front-heavy, declining and uncapped contribution to the Veil operations budget , funding operations activities such as core network and wallet development, project management, online user support, bounties, marketing and partnerships.

It should be noted that the funds allocated to the Labs and operations budgets will not stake, meaning those funds will not disadvantage those staking in the network. Salaries paid are however free to stake.

Veil Labs

Veil Labs is made up of a dedicated team with a focused mission. It is the project’s R&D entity with a goal to push the technical boundaries for privacy and anonymity without compromising scalability and performance, beginning with our industry-first release of stakeable RingCT in Q1 of 2020, followed by our research and implementation of the ground-breaking Supersonic-based protocol in late 2020.

In the end, as new methods are conceived and tested, the Veil project will be the first to implement them in Veil to stay at the forefront of the industry.