DAPS Coin Unveils Ground-Breaking Privacy Tech Following Successful Testnet

UTC by Maria Konash · 3 min read
DAPS Coin Unveils Ground-Breaking Privacy Tech Following Successful Testnet
Photo: DAPS Coin Official / Twitter

Based on the concept of ‘Privacy is a right, not a privilege,’ DAPS Coin set to create a privacy-oriented blockchain that provides the highest level of anonymity solving the ‘trust issue’ that plagues many blockchains at the forefront of crypto privacy innovation.

DAPS Coin – the privacy-focused blockchain – recently completed their first testnet in March, making the network the first successful implementation of a fully private staking and masternode chain implementing Bulletproofs and RingCT, using its proprietary Proof-of-Audit (PoA) consensus mechanism.

“Most teams avoid the idea of private blockchains due to their inherent exploitability,” says DAPS Coin Co-Founder and Head of Operations, Adel de Meyer. “This exploitability is caused by the inability to track the maximum supply and emissions by a neutral third party. The most prominent example of this critical weakness was the constant exploitation of ‘Zerocoin minting’ and CryptoNote networks.

De Meyer is referring to what is commonly known as the ‘trust issue,’ the idea that implementing total anonymity at the base protocol layer makes it impossible to audit the supply – unless workarounds involving trusted intermediaries or validators are used.

For example, the popular privacy cryptocurrency, ZCash, uses a novel technology called ‘zk-SNARKs’ that obfuscates transaction amounts on the blockchain from observation by a third party. However, ZCash requires a ‘trusted setup’ to initiate the verification keys that function as parameters for authenticating transactions on the network.

The problem lies in the implicit trust given to the ceremony participants of the setup. Users trust that the keys were not compromised, but if they were, a malicious party could use them to print ZCash tokens at will without anyone knowing.

“No written constitution, agreement, or arrangements can ever be as secure as the fundamentals of a third-party secured blockchain ledger” – DAPS white paper.

DAPS Coin addresses the trust problem with a unique approach, one that has led to some ground-breaking technology in financial privacy. Led by De Meyer and CTO Andrew Huntley, DAPS Coin coalesced multiple privacy technologies into a single network that they call their ‘Harpocrates Protocol.’

The PoS and Masternode designs of the network are inspired by the Zerocoin protocol and DASH, which implements a ‘PrivateSend’ feature with its Masternode system. And the incorporation of other premier privacy-preserving technologies from other cryptocurrency networks, like Monero and PIVX, are also included in the Harpocrates protool.

For example, DAPS Coin integrates Ring Confidential Transactions (Ring CTs) and Bulletproofs, both advanced cryptographic primitives for obfuscating transaction participants and amounts transferred, respectively.

However, DAPS Coin is also an innovative cryptocurrency network because of how it enabled the auditability of an anonymous blockchain. With a completely private blockchain, circumventing traditional methods for the ‘trust issue’ required more engineering at the consensus level – enter PoA.

DAPS Coin is a hybrid proof-of-stake (PoS), PoW (proof of work) and PoA (proof of audit) blockchain network. The magic is in PoA, which enables the network to verify that no coins were minted beyond the capped supply.

“PoA examines each PoS block since the last PoA block and audits the transactions and the PoS block itself to make sure that the totals still match up and that the total supply has not changed,” details Huntley.

Recently completing the initial testnet of the DAPS Coin network using PoA, the project is set for its third-party code audit and plans to launch mainnet by the end of Q2.

Blockchain News, News
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