Privacy on Mainnet

#1

I’d love to discuss a bit about privacy. Projects you used, built or know.

  • What are some current solutions for privacy on Mainnet?
  • Anyone using using Zepplelin + “Privacy solutions” ?

I’d like to know how can I create a ERC721 Token with metadata but make this metadata private, maybe using IPFS? Never tried, only know it points to the hash where the data is stored, but is the data itself hidden from the world if you don’t have that hash?

Also, is there any way to also make transactions private? Where Allice sends Bob “x” amount of tokens and somehow the “from” - “to” and “payload” is hidden.

I’ve been exploring Quorum the last month and in my eyes it offers many benefits, but it’s still not Mainnet, so if some level of privacy can be achieved through a “privacy solution”, I would love to try it out!

EthHub shows some projects I’m currently exploring.

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#2

Hi @ianbrtt

What are you looking to build with an ERC721 token with private metadata?

The optional metadata extension provides centralized metadata for each individual token via a tokenURI. https://docs.openzeppelin.org/v2.3.0/api/token/erc721#ierc721metadata

You could extend ERC721 and store a hash of the private metadata in the ERC721 and provide the metadata privately. This would allow verification of the provided metadata.

IPFS is content addressable storage, meaning you locate the content using the content hash. So you likely wouldn’t want to store the IPFS hash of the private metadata in the ERC721 (unless the data was protected e.g. encryption).

I haven’t used any privacy solutions on mainnet, so can’t add to this part of the discussion.

EY recently released Nightfall, (though haven’t looked into it) https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/say-hello-nightfall-paul-brody-1f/

Looking forward to reading more as this discussion progresses :smile:

#3

Thanks @abcoathup, I’d like to create an NFT ERC721 that represents an asset in the real world. That alone is pretty easy with OpenZeppelin, but to take it a step further I was thinking, if that NFT asset could “hide” some information, there could be a potential use case for companies that want to leverage Ethereum but keep some information private.

I could see its a big challenge how to achieve privacy in a public blockchain so that’s why I started exploring Quorum.

Next challenge can be how can you transact that asset and hide the sender and recipient.

I’m digging deep into this and I’m learning a lot, both on Mainnet and Quorum, for a potential use case for businesses.

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