State Of Online Privacy Today.

 

In the past decade, decentralized block-chain main-nets have transformed the privacy of peer to peer value transactions - to transact no longer requires personal identifying information (PII), but just a wallet ID. However, the first generation of block-chain cryptocurrencies has a major draw-back: any transactions coming in or out of a wallet address is exposed on a public ledger, which makes high-value wallets potentially identifiable and trackable. This issue has been addressed by privacy-focused coins (e.g., Monero) by adding another layer of opaqueness. However, despite this advance, these main-nets still fall short as the backbone of Web3-era online internet applications, where instead of an email address, anyone can login/transact using a wallet-id. To achieve this goal, we must overcome the following hurdles:

1. High latency - To confirm the state of written data, most proof of stakes (POS) or proof of work (POW) consensus backed block-chains still take an inordinate amount of time. While acceptable for serving static content or value transactions, this makes real-time back and forth communication between two nodes non-viable.

2. Low Throughput - The vast majority of main-nets support only tens-to-hundreds of transactions per second, with the fastest supporting no more than transactions in the thousands. Furthermore, they don’t scale with the addition of more nodes.

3. High technical barrier to adoption - To support dApps, currently available main-nets require a difficult set-up process that most novice users find challenging. To grow a wide user-base necessitates much simpler procedures, ideally just a straightforward installation of a wallet-associated node.

Apart from decentralized networks, an alternative is The Onion Router (TOR) network, frequently used to subvert oppressive regimes' control over internet media. But this protocol also has similar drawbacks. First, the entry and exit nodes are usually publicly known, which makes the access easily identifiable and subsequently denied. Further, by assuming control of a significant portion of the entry/exit/relay nodes, one may be able to subvert the three-step routing protocol and leak the identity of destination and/or source nodes. Second, setting up the entry, exit, and relay nodes that the protocol relies on entails a cumbersome process. In addition, the network is not built in ways where individual users are incentivized to run their own nodes, hampering the growth in network capacity and decentralization.

What are we building?

Overcoming all the above limitations, our routing protocol will usher in the era of Web3. The core technology powering all of our and partnering dApps is Amplicon P2P protocol. While our dApps can use any existing block-chain main-net to facilitate (eventual) storage of packet communications, employing Amplicon P2P protocol lets us deliver these packets to their destination node instantaneously, while being decentralized, and trustless.

Amplicon P2P is a lightweight and fast parallel routing protocol that ensures packets to reach, in real-time, their destined node within an average number of hops (i.e., relay nodes), while being redundantly routed through a certain number of relay nodes as well. (Destination nodes are simply specified by wallet-id or public key.) Both these aspects are controlled by the source node, and no information about itself, the package contents, or the destination node is revealed. The redundant routing circuit makes it impossible to discern if a node was simply routing a message or originating/consuming it. This plausible deniability of all nodes distinguishes our technology from TOR routing. Furthermore, Amplicon P2P incentivizes relay-nodes to participate by baking the concept of a routing fee into its routing protocol. Importantly, while this fee is negligible for individual p2p transmissions–a faucet drop is intended to cover 1 million chat conversations–mass-transmissions with multiple destinations, which require high-throughput and high network usage entails higher cost. While deterring spammers, this design allows organizations aiming to reach out to mass audiences (e.g., on a mailing list consisting of wallet-ids instead of emails) to achieve their goals through investments in AMPLI (AMPLI is the currency paid-out to the relay nodes as fees).

The Ampli P2P protocol is currently under IP filing, which will conclude soon. Watch out for further details.