By
Chimamanda U. Martha
April 24th, 2024
After nearly a decade of evolution, public blockchains have been greatly improved in technology, their long-believed cornerstone. Despite the “impossible trinity” still exists, they feel it no more urgent to strike a balance among performance, security and decentralization, thanks to many alternative solutions emerging on the horizon.
As their applications approach real-business scenarios, blockchains have to support these scenarios by providing privacy protection, anonymity and developer friendliness. In view of this criterion, LinkChain, a public blockchain from China, technologically outperforms all other digital currencies in the world.
A Privacy Protection System Supports Fully Anonymous Transactions
Anonymous transactions have been always overlooked in conventional digital currencies. Although classical currencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum maintain a certain privacy, all information about their transaction flow is transparent. If the identity of a single address involved in any transaction is revealed, the amount and flow direction of all transactions might be tracked and verified. Unfortunately, it is easy to figure out who owns an address in the actual transaction environment. Although transaction addresses do not correspond to user identities, there are always other data that may disclose the owner of an address. For example, if it is ascertained that someone sold 100 Bitcoins on a certain day, it will be a piece of cake to find his/her Bitcoin wallet address by searching transactions of such a Bitcoin amount in the period in question. Following that, all other people who have dealt with the address can be tracked.
Protecting the privacy of transactions is foremost in any real-business scenarios because it is necessary for personal security and free market competition. As a result, no digital currency is acceptable to these scenarios unless it enables anonymous transactions. This is indeed one of major factors that keep Bitcoin out of real business and contributed to its crash in 2018.
LinkChain, in its latest open-source release, maintains strict anonymity in transactions. Using Ring Signature, Ring CT and Bulletproof technology, it safeguards the privacy of senders, recipients, and amount of transactions, and ensures these and other transaction data to be unrelated, untraceable, and thereby highly confidential. Specifically, Ring Signature protects the privacy of transaction parties by allowing a validator to check the authenticity of signatures without identifying which of a group of ring-signature members performed the transaction. In addition, Zero-knowledge Proof hides the amount of every transaction from the public view. The outside can see no more than the validation result, let alone the value of the amount itself. To meet the vast application scenarios of transparent transactions, LinkChain’s privacy feature is optional; that is, users may choose whether or not to activate the feature when they initiate transactions.
Unrivalled Technological Advantages
Although there have been some anonymous blockchains available on the market, their technologies are inferior to that of LinkChain, as indicated by the detailed comparison below.
| Key Technologies | LinkChain | Dash | Zcash | Monero | Grin |
| Anonymous senders | RingSignature | CoinJoin | ZKP | Ring Signature | MinbleWimble |
| Anonymous recipients | Ring CT | N/A | ZKP | RingCT | N/A |
| Concealed amount of transfer | Bulletproof | Denomination | ZKP | Bulletproof | PerdesenCommitment |
| Trusted initialization | Not required | Not required | Required | Not required | Not required |
| TPS | 1000 | 50 | 7 | 20 | 50 |
| Time of transaction confirmation | 3 seconds | > 1 hour | > 1 hour | > 1 hour | > 10 minutes |
| Transaction model | UTXO+Account | UTXO | UTXO | UTXO | UTXO |
| Support for smart contracts | EVM+WASM | Not supported | Not supported | Not supported | Not supported |
| Consensus mechanism | EBFT | PoW–X11 | PoW –Equihash | PoW –CryptonightV7 | PoW –CuckooCycle |
Comparison of Technical Performances of Today’s Major Anonymous Cryptocurrencies
According to the Table, LinkChain and Monero both protect privacy of senders, recipients, and amount of transactions using Ring Signature, Ring CT and Bulletproof technology respectively.
Unlike Zcash that uses zk-SNARK (Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge) for privacy protection, LinkChain eliminates trusted initialization and, thereby, toxic waste.
Dash secures the privacy of senders using Coin Join but does nothing to that of recipients. Although it mixes coins for different transactions of the same denomination to conceal the amount of transfer, the privacy so obtained is inferior to that of the other digital currencies.
Based on the MimbleWimble protocol, Grin keeps senders anonymous using a similar technology to Dash’s Coin Join, and, like Dash, lacks the anonymity protection for recipients. However, it is more private than Dash thanks to the Perdesen Commitment used to protect transferred amount, but is still less private than LinkChain, Zcash, or Monero.
The comparison indicates that LinkChain performs much better than all other currencies. It needs no more than 3 seconds to confirm any transaction, by contrast to one hour or more taken by any other anonymous currencies for a single transaction. Moreover, it offers sky-high throughput of transactions. A single LinkChain can run with more than 1,000 TPS (transactions per second), comparable to that of EOS and much higher than the two-digit magnitude of the other currencies. Furthermore, the TPS performance would be considerably improved if LinkChain’s multi-chain architecture is put into service in future.
Using variants of the PoW (Proof-of-Work) consensus mechanism, all other currencies suffer common deficiencies of this mechanism – low throughput, long time of confirmation, weak consistency, risks of bifurcation and waste of electricity. This is why all high-performance public blockchains have adopted the inherently-high-performing BFT algorithms, such as aBFT used by EOS and improved BFT algorithm used by Facebook’s Libra. However, these algorithms are disadvantageous in their huge traffic and weak error-tolerant rate.
LinkChain’s EBFT algorithm reaches Byzantine consensus by automatically replacing validator nodes in a periodic manner. When a transaction is to be confirmed each time, several validator nodes are randomly selected from a validator pool, which not only minimizes inter-node traffic, but also avoids node exposure and improves fault tolerance. Therefore, it ensures security and high throughput, low latency, and absolute consistency of transactions.
To put in a nutshell, LinkChain inherits high privacy protection of anonymous currencies and avoids their frequently-low performance, which makes it a solution to nearly all scenarios of large-scale business applications.
A Friendly Environment for Application Developers
To be suitable for real-business applications, a public chain must provide a developer-friendly environment, in addition to the core features such as anonymity and transaction-processing capacity. This environment is necessary because all business uses rely on applications; the more the applications, the broader the scenarios for the implementation of public blockchains are.
LinkChain boasts two unique technologies in this domain. The first is the innovation of the multiple-asset model. At present, blockchains run on two asset models – the Account model represented by Ethereum and the UTXO model represented by Bitcoin. Initially, the two models were not interchangeable with one another. For example, you could not trade with Bitcoin on the Ethereum platform.
However, LinkChain supports both models to help users manage their assets. Moreover, developers only need a single type of smart contracts to serve both types of accounts.
Developers are empowered to issue Token assets on LinkChain using smart contracts, or transfer digital currencies from other existing public blockchains to LinkChain through cross-chain protocols. They can also tokenize physical commodities or assets from under the chain to over LinkChain and then conduct transaction at a LinkChain-based decentralized exchange. This means that all your digital currencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum can be migrated to LinkChain, where a range of services covering high-performance privacy protection and decentralized exchanges are available. Because LinkChain, as the first in the industry, enables anonymous transactions that support contracts, all these cryptocurrencies from other chains (even those tokens generated using smart contracts) are treated like LinkToken, the native token on LinkChain. In other words, when they are maintained and managed or are engaged in transparent or private transactions, they are manipulated directly over their underlying account models rather than being constrained in the contracts. Thanks to the support for both types of accounts and multiple-asset models, LinkChain offers complete privacy solutions and decentralized exchanges.
The second is the support for dual virtual machines. Conventional cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum just support EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) and, therefore, only the Solidity programming language. Developers have to learn this language before they can develop Ethereum applications. With support for both WASM (WebAssembly) and EVM, LinkChain enables users to choose any common language they are familiar with, such as C/C++ or Solidity, to develop smart contracts. This advantage is unavailable with any other public blockchain.
Technical Architecture of LinkChain.
To sum up, LinkChain fully protects privacy of senders, recipients, and amount of transactions and significantly outperforms today’s major cryptocurrencies. Running on EBFT, an efficient, bifurcation-free consensus algorithm, LinkChain supports both UTXO and Account models. It also allows users to develop smart contracts on the basis of EVM or WASM. With all these innovative technologies in place, LinkChain is recognized by the market as an unprecedented tech-champion among the present digital currencies. Indeed, its native anonymous currency – LinkToken – is so valued by market players that LinkChain Cloud could exchange 260 million of this token for RMB 2.6 billion-worth shares of Sevenstar Bay Yacht Club in July 2019. The purchase had been the world’s largest one of real asset with digital asset, fully demonstrating the appreciation of LinkChain’s native anonymous currency, LinkToken.
Now, the source codes of the new LinkChain version have been opened and the test process has initiated. Trial run is expected to start with the help of selected nodes in mid-September, when LinkChain will grant generous awards to global white-hat hackers discovering bugs to help maintain the security and stability of the chain.
In addition, LinkChain is recruiting validator nodes from all over the world. The first round of recruiting is coming to an end, and the first batch of 5 such nodes will be finalized at the end of August 2019. This will unveil the self-governance and co-construction era of LinkChain, which, helped by the validator nodes, will be pushed into business scenarios even faster.