Decred Adds More Privacy to Its Coin

Decred, a developer of digital currency that is currently ranked 32nd by market capitalization, came out with their new privacy features.

“It is expected that roughly 12.5% of all Decred in circulation will make use of privacy within a few months,” the creators claim.

Project Lead for Decred and the author of the post, Jake Yocom-Piatt, explains that the privacy feature is based on CoinShuffle++, a peer-to-peer coin mixing protocol, which enables tickets (votes within the project’s governance system) to be mixed with transactions, and this makes it difficult for somebody to learn a user’s identity or to separate particular payments from the others.

The privacy feature is created with simplicity in mind, so requires a few hundred lines of code for the core logic, instead of “thousands or tens of thousands for other privacy implementations.” The chances for issues and errors to emerge are minimized this way, as “less code means less to break,” Decred’s Twitter thread explains.

After some additional testing, this code will become part of the master branch and be included in the next release, 1.5.0, they said, adding that “While the work already completed is substantive, there is still much to do.”

Meanwhile, Chris Burniske, a partner at New York-based venture capitalist firm Placeholder, which invested in Decred back in 2018, believes that Decred is “is on the verge of becoming a “privacy coin””, saying that it’s “another example of how with good governance, you can have any feature you want.” Prominent Bitcoiner Udi Wertheimer disagreed, saying that Burniske didn’t pay attention to the details provided in the blog post.

Also, Reddit user “eqisow” noted that, given their lack of use, “optional privacy features always leave a lot to be desired,” adding that “this blog post says that “private” transactions with Decred will be 12x the cost of normal transactions. In other words, almost everyone will send standard, transparent transactions.” The user notes that it’d be good if Decred was able to be the first project to make the transition from transparent to fully private.

For further explanation on Decred’s new privacy features, check out the official rap track.

At the moment of writing (13:22 UTC), DCR, the native token of Decred, trades at c. USD 22.62. It dropped by 7% in the past 24 hours and 10% in the last seven days. It’s also down by 47% in the past 12 months.