Monero-Style Privacy Is Ready for Ethereum

Fusing the privacy features of the latter into ethereum would make many of the platform's stakeholders, including developers who have been working on privacy-enhancing features for some time, excited.

Detailed by the authors of the white paper, Rebekah Mercer and Sarah Meiklejohn, during the conference, Mobius isn't bogged down by the weight of typical privacy tech - indeed, using cryptographic primitives that were added to ethereum in October, transactions that use Mobius cost only a little more than a standard ethereum transaction and takes mere milliseconds to execute.

While it's not yet available for ethereum users, an open source implementation has been published by UK-based distributed ledger startup Clearmatics, and according to Mercer, deploying it to the public ethereum chain wouldn't be too labor-intensive.

"Clearmatics have all the code so you could literally just push it to the ethereum blockchain. They actually have tutorials as well, so it's pretty well developed," she told CoinDesk.

Building the technology into ethereum would have the advantage of functioning not just for ether transactions, also allow projects that built tokens with the ERC-20 standard, or even crypto-collectibles, to take advantage of the tech as well.

"So what we thought: is this a inherent thing, if you do a decentralized procedure do you need to pay for it in terms of communication? And what we found was that using ethereum you don't actually have to make this compromise at all."

To work around those trade-offs, Mercer and Meiklejohn built a cryptographic device named a ring signature into an ethereum smart contract, that obscures payment information by mixing it up with the other participants in the Mobius contract.

Still, while the tech is technically viable, Mercer said she is unaware of any attempts to implement it on public ethereum itself.

"I think it's just like how ethereum is used these days. It's not what people expect, people don't expect to use ethereum for privacy-sensitive transactions. It's just not its selling point, it's for decentralized apps, companies, traders and CryptoKitties," she told CoinDesk.

There's other hurdles as well- while pushing Mobius onto public ethereum wouldn't be too complex, there's plenty of work to be done to make the technology more accessible to users, as currently, participating in a Mobius contract would be a prohibitively complex task.