PowerKee’s Bastion of Privacy #8
During the week, Facebook and Twitter have effectively de-platformed the sitting President of the United States. Apple and Google took action against Parler, a social media network used extensively by Donald Trump supporters, and AWS suspended services to the app, taking it offline. No matter where you are on the political spectrum, these actions raise serious concerns about our freedom of speech and the protection of our privacy.
These events led to growing calls to decentralize everything and to learn about internet privacy tools. One powerful combination of privacy tools is PowerKee and the Secret Network. The Secret Network is a layer-1 blockchain with programmable privacy. Decentralized applications (dApps) can be built on top of the Secret Network using encrypted data. This article will take a more in-depth look at the Secret Network, its native token, and how it combines with PowerKee to provide a full-rounded privacy solution.
What is the Secret Network?
Secret Network is the evolution of Enigma, another cryptocurrency project created in 2014. Founded by MIT graduates Guy Zyskind and Can Kisagun, Enigma was a scaling solution for the Ethereum blockchain that enabled privacy for smart contracts. The mainnet launched in February of last year and the project re-branded as the Secret Network in May. It’s worth noting that Enigma settled with the SEC last year after the regulator decided that its token, sold in 2017, was a security.
The Secret Network blockchain is based on Cosmos SDK / Tendermint and uses the delegated proof of stake consensus mechanism. It’s the first blockchain that natively preserves privacy for smart contract interactions. Outputs, inputs, and states are encrypted. The project focuses not only on the privacy of transactions, but also on the privacy of computations.
SCRT and Secret Tokens
What makes the Secret Network particularly interesting, beyond privacy-enabled smart contracts, is the team’s balanced approach to transparency and privacy. The blockchain has its native token, SCRT, which is used to pay for computational resources (similar to ETH) and by validators for staking. All transactions in SCRT are entirely public.
The other type of tokens in the Secret Network ecosystem are Secret Tokens. These are tokens transferred to the Secret Network from other blockchains via bridges like the Ethereum bridge that went live in December. For example, Secret Ethereum is a programmable SNIP-20 token and all the interactions with Secret Ethereum, and other Secret Tokens, are encrypted and therefore private.
Combining The Secret Network with PowerKee
The Secret Network has several interesting privacy-preserving properties. Smart contracts can be designed with privacy in focus. This allows computation to be carried out in both a decentralized and anonymous manner.
However, while the technology behind the Secret Network is impressive, users face friction if they wish to ensure privacy in their transactions. As described above, Secret Tokens must be imported via a bridge from another blockchain for anonymous transactions.
PowerKee is focused on making privacy easy on the base layer. With PowerKee, preserving privacy is as simple as owning and transacting with KEE tokens. Moreover, PowerKee is addressing one of the biggest obstacles facing the privacy coin space.
A lack of venues to transition between fiat capital and privacy coins has been one of the major factors holding back privacy coin usage. Centralized exchanges and service providers have been extremely cautious when it comes to privacy coin services.
Through the launch of a peer-to-peer exchange, PowerKee will address this and facilitate bidirectional fiat-to-privacy coin trades. As the exchange evolves, it will provide marketplaces for a wide variety of privacy coins, including Secret Tokens that have been bridged on to the Secret Network.
The dual force of The Secret Network and PowerKee provides powerful privacy assurances for the users of these technologies. Anonymity can be assured within smart contract computation, value transfer, and fiat-to-privacy coin trades.
About PowerKee
PowerKee is a cryptocurrency network that makes privacy easy. Users can transact cheaply and instantly while maintaining anonymity. The PowerKee protocol uses a mixture of zero-knowledge proofs and coin mixing to provide strong privacy assurances to its users.
