Lately, only a handful of cryptocurrency initiatives have managed to capture global user attention, leading to divisions among enthusiasts and critics, extensive coverage by mass media, and scrutiny from regulators.

‘Worldcoin’, as it is called, wants to build a ‘more human economic system’ and become ‘the world’s largest human identity and financial network’. It envisions facilitating emerging technologies such as AI and digital IDs; it doesn’t take a genius to see the potential forthcoming privacy concerns.

The project, co-founded by Sam Altman (OpenAI), got massive attention through their rollout of ‘orbs’. These shiny devices are designed to take photographs of a person’s iris, a process through which users are integrated into the Worldcoin system. In exchange, users are compensated with a nominal amount of their token.

In this article we want to provide deeper insights into the Worldcoin project, including potential privacy issues and ongoing investigations by regulators from different countries worldwide.

What is Worldcoin?

The Worldcoin whitepaper states that ‘proof of personhood’ is one of the main ideas behind the project, meaning the proof that somebody is a real, unique person. According to Worldcoin, the best way to create a scalable and inclusive proof of personhood in times of ‘increasingly powerful AI’ is through custom biometric hardware. That said, the main devices of this biometric hardware are currently their ‘orbs’, which take photographs of one’s iris.

Worldcoin Statistics; https://worldcoin.org

Among the features offered by Worldcoin are the ‘World ID,’ which utilizes iris scans, the ‘World App’ aimed at granting access to a global decentralized financial infrastructure, and the issuance of the ‘Worldcoin Token’ to all participants within the network.

Why Are There Privacy Concerns?

According to Worldcoin, the privacy of the World IDs is maintained through zero-knowledge proofs. However, relying solely on this approach is not the answer, as highlighted by blockworks.co as well:

“Zero-knowledge proofs can generate impressive privacy guarantees. But in the case of Worldcoin marketing, they’re more theater than substance. Taking off your shoes at the airport makes it look like important precautions are being taken (but doesn’t actually make you any safer); and long blog posts about zero-knowledge proofs distract from, but don’t in fact address, the problem of Worldcoin asking for users’ trust.” — https://blockworks.co/news/worldcoin-privacy-concerns

Nonetheless, it is questionable what will happen with the iris scans collected by the orbs.

Privacy experts worldwide are concerned that these scans could potentially be repurposed, or worse, accessed by malicious actors, similar to data thefts observed in other companies.

Sam Altman on Twitter: "day 3 of @worldcoin launch, crazy lines around the world. one person getting verified every 8 seconds now. pic.twitter.com/vHRu1sWMT3 / Twitter"

day 3 of @worldcoin launch, crazy lines around the world. one person getting verified every 8 seconds now. pic.twitter.com/vHRu1sWMT3

Quotes from the Worldcoin blog are not very reassuring either, in short they merely state ‘trust us!’. Yet, as anyone should have learned by now, is ‘Don’t trust, verify!’ is more than just a phrase:

“During our field-testing phase, we are collecting and securely storing more data than we will upon its completion… We will delete all the biometric data we have collected during field testing once our algorithms are fully-trained.” — https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/06/1048981/worldcoin-cryptocurrency-biometrics-web3/

Also questionable is the rationale behind Worldcoin’s initial deployment of these orbs in economically disadvantaged nations like Kenya. A lot of Kenyans went to great lengths just to get their iris scanned, all for the sake of getting 25 World tokens valued at approximately $50. And to add to that, many of them remained unaware of the underlying purpose behind the iris scans they underwent.

Reactions of Regulators Worldwide

It comes as no surprise then, that Worldcoin got the attention from government bodies worldwide, including the likes of the Bavarian state in Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Argentina, and notably Kenya, where masses of people attended the iris-scan-ceremony.

A 15-member kenyan committee was formed in order to investigate the project, three weeks after the African country had stopped Worldcoin’s operations:

“The Interior Cabinet Secretary Kithure Kindiki, who has played a key role in suspending Worldcoin operations, told the House committee that the government is concerned by Worldcoin’s activities registering citizens and collecting iris data, all of which he claims pose serious security risks.” — https://cointelegraph.com/news/kenya-investigate-worldcoin

It is to be expected that more countries will start with their own investigations, making it unclear if the Worldcoin project will ever be able to reach a significant user base.

Adding to the concern is the involvement of (alleged) former Worldcoin employees, who state that they have already been in contact with authorities due to their witness of ‘sloppy and/or illegal things’. As Cointelegraph reported two days ago, this alleged ex-employee asserterd that he and others ‘had seen red flags since day one’.

Conclusion: Linking Money to Biometric Information is Not a Good Idea

In essence, linking a scan of your iris to your money and overall your financial activities is a bad idea. Worldcoin asking its users to ‘trust’ them alone is a red flag. It’s essential to remember that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is currently investigating OpenAI, one of the main forces behind Worldcoin, due to violations of consumer protection laws and the usage of specific big data sets.

We do not see Worldcoin becoming a ‘new financial system’, nor do we see it providing substantial privacy infrastructure. For true privacy preservation, one will likely need to turn to PriFi solutions like ours in the years to come.

Don’t trust. Verify!

Worldcoin: A Potential Privacy Nightmare was originally published in Navio Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As you may have already noticed via Twitter, LunarDAO, an PriFi-oriented investment fund on the blockchain, has bundled forces with us in order to launch the Private Finance Syndicate (PFS). Financial privacy is not a privilege, it is a fundamental human right. In the years to come, it will become a necessity. The PFS, founded by Navcoin and LunarDAO, is set out to fight for freedom!

While cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and blockchain-ecosystems like Ethereum enabled a new asset class and innovative applications (dApps; DeFi), there is one central problem that not many people are really thinking through, which is the fact that those solutions are not anonymous, but pseudonymous.

Privacy Becomes Necessity

However, as we were able to observe the past years, privacy is something that will be needed in the future. Growing regulations of cryptocurrencies, one could even say regulatory overreach, the global introduction of CBDCs, the ban of private cryptocurrencies in certain countries, all those things are giving a clear signal: The fundamental human right of financial privacy is threatened!

This is the reason why projects like ours do, what we do, developing the PriFi-solutions of tomorrow. If we do not innovate, if we do not use private finance solutions, we might wake up in a dystopian world one day. A world in which every transaction is monitored, a world in which access to your funds can be revoked literally by a mouse click.

PFS: Let’s fight together!

The Private Finance Syndicate (PFS) aims to fight back. We are building a non-profit organisation that bundles forces of projects and individuals in the PriFi space. We do not see other PriFi projects as competition, but rather as like-minded partners.

Regulators and government bodies will come for all of us if we do our job properly, giving what the people need in the future: financial privacy. Unity, exchange of knowledge and network, shared ideals — with every project joining us, we grow stronger together.

In the next weeks we will start to onboard relevant partners (PriFi projects as well as individuals such as developers and researchers) who share our vision and want to be a part of the PFS. If you are interested in finding out more, feel free to visit privatefinancesyndicate.io and read our manifesto! Also, you can follow us on Twitter.

Let’s fight for financial privacy. Together!

LunarDAO & Navcoin: Launching the Private Finance Syndicate (PFS) was originally published in Navio Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Cryptocurrencies have come a long way — yet, we are still just scratching the surface when it comes to one aspect in particular, which is: Privacy. The origins of cryptocurrencies lay in the Cypherpunk movement.

‘A cypherpunk is any individual advocating widespread use of strong cryptography and privacy-enhancing technologies as a route to social and political change. […] Cypherpunks have been engaged in an active movement since at least the late 1980s.’

Back then, the foundation for systems, like Bitcoin, that we use today was laid out. However, the central aspect of ‘privacy-enhancement’ got kind of lost over the years. Today, Bitcoin is not a means of private payments, as it is pseudonymous but not anonymous.

However, a big number of Bitcoin investors and users are not really aware of those problems. The same goes for other chains, like Ethereum, BSC, Avax, and others, which all share the same problem of being only pseudonymous.

We at Navcoin are focusing on delivering an innovative Private Finance Ecosystem in which you can maintain your financial privacy and use new solutions like our Private Tokens. Before we dive into, a bit background info about our ecosystem:

Navcoin Ecosystem & blsCT Protocol

Navcoin is a Private Finance (PriFi) Ecosystem that has been built over multiple years. It runs on the self-developed blsCT protocol and offers unique features, such as private tokens and private NFTs, to our users. All our work aims to create an ecosystem that can maintain and/or increase user privacy.

The blsCT protocol was developed by our very own Navcoin developers. This technology combines the advantages of BLS (Boneh-Lynn-Shacham) Signatures, originally introduced in 2001, plus CTs (Confidential Transactions). This way, the protocol is enabled to transact funds in full privacy, in a fast and scalable way.

‘Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age. Privacy is not secrecy. A private matter is something one doesn’t want the whole world to know, but a secret matter is something one doesn’t want anybody to know.’

— Eric Hughes

Privacy is crucial and a fundamental human right. We believe that everyone around the globe should be able to make private transactions in order to protect their personal freedom, financial data, personal security, and business privacy, to name the most important areas.

One of the features Navcoin offers is the creation and trading of ‘private tokens’. This holds great potential, as interest in privacy solutions is likely to continue to grow while appropriate solutions are not being offered by most blockchains.

What are Private Tokens on Navcoin?

Private Tokens are a unique feature of the Navcoin ecosystem. They allow anyone to mint their own private tokens, which are created on top of our blsCT protocol. Transactions with those tokens are as private as regular xNAV transactions; nobody can see how many tokens you hold, how much you send or to whom, or where the funds were originally coming from.

Other blockchain-ecosystems, which are not anonymous but pseudonymous, such as Ethereum, Avalanche, etc., could profit from facilitating the Navcoin ecosystem to give their tokens a privacy-shield.

Use Cases for Private Tokens

Private tokens have various use cases, which will be presented in the following. Most important to note is that they can be both arbitrary tokens and a representation of an underlying asset. The latter ones are, of course, the most important, i.e.:

Stablecoins (USDT)

Tying a cryptocurrency to an asset is not a new idea. What if you could create a private version of USDT? While stablecoins already exist (USDT, USDC), and are mainly used as settlement currency in our industry, the bigger ones are all lacking one thing: Privacy. Transactions are only pseudonymous, as they happen mostly on the Ethereum blockchain. Navcoin private tokens enable you to maintain privacy.

Physical Assets

When it comes to tokenization of real world assets, we are still at a very early stage. There are a lot of currently ongoing experiments with non-private technologies aiming to tokenize even assets like real estate. In the future, this process could also be run on a private finance ecosystem such as Navcoin.

Digital Assets

NFTs, digital land, Metaverse, In-Game Ownership… the Web3/GameFi wave will probably slowly build up over the next few years. Developers could also use the private token technology from Navcoin in this arena in order to give their players the best possible privacy shield to protect their in-game assets from curious third eyes.

It will be interesting to see which applications will be the most popular. We will constantly evaluate and optimise our products and provide tools for better use, such as our own DEX for Navcoin private tokens.

How To Use It — The Whisper Wallet

Those features can soon be used with our brand new Whisper Wallet, which can already be tested in the beta phase. The key features, as presented before, are sending, receiving and staking coins, as well as swapping NAV to xNAV, and the private token and private NFT features.

A selection of Crypto Influencers & Privacy Advocates will soon participate in an official beta test, in order to ensure the best possible usability. Bugs and other issues with the user experience can always be reported in our Discord (#whisper-dev), via email (dev@whisperwallet.net), or by creating an issue via Github.

If you need help to get started, here is a detailed guide to set up your own Whisper Wallet.

Privacy For Everyone, Everywhere

Cryptocurrencies and tokens enable us to create new, digital economies. However, one can not ignore the dystopian feeling one gets when reading about certain events in the industry, such as the arrest of developers, the calls for broader regulation, and a general movement towards an even more surveilled society. One of the main tools for this purpose will be CBDCs (Central Bank issued Digital Currencies).

Meanwhile, only a few players in this industry are really recognizing the tremendous potential that a true private finance ecosystem could offer. Governed by no central entity but in a decentralised manner, with nobody being able to censor it or shut it down.

In order to profit from the advantages that cryptocurrencies and tokenization offer us, we have to make these new digital economies private; as privacy is a fundamental human right!

At Navcoin, we value human rights and are willing to fight for them. With our technological inventions, i.e., the blsCT protocol, we are able to offer a complete private finance (PriFi) ecosystem, thus enabling our users to use private cash. Transactions are fast and easy to do via our new Whisper Wallet.

The Use Cases of Our Private Tokens was originally published in Navio Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Navcoin is a PriFi Ecosystem that has been built over five years ago, includes the self-developed blsCT protocol and unique features such as private tokens and private NFTs. Blockchain technology and cryptography enables us to create new solutions in order to maintain and/or increase our users’ privacy.

Privacy is not just ‘important’, it is a fundamental human right. We at Navcoin believe that people should be able to make private transactions in order to protect their financial activities from the eyes of a third; there are many good reasons for using privacy solutions besides the small part of illicit activities that is happening:

Personal Freedom

• Freedom rights are non-negotiable, however, money is needed to pursue those
• If a citizen is not able to pay for certain goods/services his freedom gets limited
• Private Finance solutions enable you to maintain your financial privacy and thus your freedom

Financial Data Protection

• It is simply nobody’s business what financial transactions you are doing
• Governments are increasing their surveillance ambitions through CBDCs
• Data that is gathered by them will be used to gain full control

Personal Security

• If you are a wealthy cryptocurrency investors, privacy coins can help you obfuscate your funds on-chain, depending on the amount
• Protect your balances from malicious players/hackers

Business Privacy

• Bitcoin as payment option has disadvantages for businesses
• Clients as well as competitors can see their financial data

So, now you know already a bit more about what Navcoin offers and why it is important. But how exactly does the underlying technology work?

Navcoin Technology Explained

Privacy coins, same as other cryptocurrencies, are operating on the blockchain. On public blockchains, every transaction will be recorded; including who sends how many coins to whom. This leads to the possibility of tracing transactions, which is already done by private companies such as Chainalaysis who work also together with (U.S.) law enforcement and tax offices.

Privacy coins have special specifications and features that make it possible to avoid showing and recording this transaction data. Example, Monero: Stealth addresses, Ring Signatures and RingCT are taking care to dissociate accounts participating in a transaction, mixing identities with decoy identities and obscure the transaction amounts.

Navcoin developed its very own privacy solution in form of the blsCT-protocol, running on a PoS-consensus. Soon, Navcoin will operate on a fully private blockchain.

PoS-Consensus

The Navcoin network is secured by a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism that allows anyone to use their NAV to validate transactions. PoS is the alternative to Proof-of-Work (PoW) that requires miners to solve mathematical riddles to process transactions and earn block rewards. To do this, one needs expensive hardware and the will to pay a lot for energy.

blsCT Protocol

The blsCT protocol got developed by the NavCoin developers and combines the benefits of BLS (Boneh-Lynn-Shacham) Signatures as well as CTs (Confidential Transactions), enabling our users to transact Navcoin in full privacy — confidential, untraceable, unlinkable, while transactions are fast and the ecosystem scalable.

BLS signatures were already introduced back in 2001 and can compress a group of signatures into one, which then can be used to authenticate the entire group: All Navcoin transactions in one block can be combined to one tx with one signature.

While this gives us advantages regarding privacy and scalability, observers can also not possibly tell if a transaction has been aggregated or not. Here a diagram of how the aggregation market works, in which you can earn coins for participating in the mixing process:

Navcoin DAO

First things first — what is a DAO, anyway? It is short for ‘Decentralized Autonomous Organization’, an organization in which rules are embedded and enforced by code. There is no central entity having control over a DAO. In the following we will describe the single modules of the Navcoin DAO.

Consultations

The consultations process includes three phases, namely support, reflection and voting.

Support: In the support phase the consultation is created, set up with the ‘Maximum of voting cycles for a consultation to gain support’. If there is no support during the cycles the consultation will expire. In order to give others more time to review and support consultations the support then still has to pass the ‘earliest cycle when a consultation can get in confirmation phase’.

Reflection: The length of this phase is defined in the consensus parameter “Length in cycles for the reflection phase of consultations”. This is to give people enough time to think over what they want to vote on regarding the consultation.

Voting: The length of this phase is defined in the consensus parameter “Length in cycles for consultation votings”. Votes will be reset at each cycle. After the last cycle ends, the votes will be locked in and stored in the blockchain for future reference

Consensus Parameters

Since Navcoin operates on a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus algorithm, the consensus parameters are enforced on the whole network, while proposals for possible changes can be made by anyone.

Once a change passes the voting process it takes effect on the first block of the next block cycle. The difference to ‘consultations’ is that multiple answers are not a requirement and voting can end earlier in case YES or NO got at least 75% of the votes.

Community Funding

We are always working closely together with our community, thus also funding community efforts that help to optimize and grow the Navcoin ecosystem. 20% of each block reward goes to the Community Fund.

Community members can submit a proposal, vote on proposals, submit payment requests once an accepted proposal was worked off and vote on payment requests of others. More details about the voting and payment process here.

Navcoin Staking

Navcoin Staking is interesting for anyone who wants to support a decentralized private finance project while making profit. The Navcoin staking ROI is fixed at 4% (according to staking.com) and works with minimum system specifications (minimum 3GB HDD space plus 1GB RAM). Moreover there is no minimum amount of NAV required in order to stake.

Mission: Create a Fully Private Blockchain

In the near future, Navcoin will be a fully private and operational blockchain, which is our #1 goal for the time being. One of the changes that will be put in place is that xNAV will disappear and that the privacy properties of the blsCT protocol will be mandatory for any transaction in the Navcoin system.

Navcoin Products

Private Tokens & Marketplace

Private tokens will enable you to mint your own private tokens that then work on top of the blsCT protocol. All transactions made with these tokens are as secure and anonymous as regular xNAV transactions.

Those can be arbitrary tokens, but also tokens whose value is linked to an underlying asset/currency such as USD, EUR, or precious metals. Also possible are private tokenized in-game assets, real estate… There are really no limits.

Other blockchains, which are non-private, could gain a big advantage through facilitating the Navcoin ecosystem to give their non-anonymous tokens a fresh privacy-shield.

You will be able to trade private tokens on a DEX, a non-custodial exchange service designed to exchange Private Tokens on the Navcoin blockchain.

Private NFTs & Marketplace

NFTs have been the biggest hype in the crypto sector over the past two years and the trend is unlikely to go away, at least for the foreseeable future. For us, it’s not about the hype — it’s simply about promoting the maintenance of financial privacy in the NFT sector as well.

The problem is that most NFTs are minted on public blockchains like Ethereum that offer no protections for anonymized mining or payments. Anyone can examine transactions, find wallets, view assets, and draw conclusions.

On the Navcoin blockchain, you will be able to mint private NFTs. By using the blsCT privacy protocol, the transaction details (sender, receiver) will be obfuscated. The metadata of the NFT will still be public, but it will be impossible to tell who owns the NFT or from which person it was originally sent.

In order to make our role in the space clear, one of our community-funded projects will be the first decentralized marketplace for private NFTs.

Conclusion

Privacy coins are not the devil’s work, as governments and regulators would like to make you believe. They are what cryptocurrencies were usually all about back in the day: a private, anonymous means of payment.

Over the next few years, we are expecting a higher influx of new PriFi users and are looking forward to welcoming lots of them to the Navcoin ecosystem!

Let’s build! The future is decentralized — and private!

Navcoin Technology For Beginners was originally published in Navio Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The year is 2022. Bitcoin and Ethereum have finally established themselves and it is safe to say that they are here to stay. However, there is not much left of the original vision of a cryptocurrency from back in Cypherpunk days.

Yet most Bitcoin investors tend to overlook one issue, which is the fact that Bitcoin (BTC) is not anonymous, but only pseudonymous. The same goes for Ethereum (ETH) and any other public, non-private blockchain. This is where privacy coins come in handy, as they enable concealment of the sending and receiving addresses, as well as the amount of coins being sent.

With regulators worldwide pushing for new rulings and law enforcement criminalizing DeFi developers, it is time to go back to the roots in order to create a true, cryptography-based economy. Ecosystems like ours have the goal of enabling everyone to maintain their financial privacy: We call it Private Finance (PriFi), as a counterpart to Decentralized Finance (DeFi) — and yes, we are still very early!

In this article, we take a closer look at false assumptions from regulators, law enforcement and mass media regarding privacy coins, and portray various legit use cases of private finance solutions, which are perfectly legal; including some Navcoin features/use cases that no other project has!

Origins Of The Criticism Regarding Privacy Coins

At its core, the criticism towards privacy coins is always based on certain ‘myths’, with the most popular ones being: ‘They are just used for money laundering! Tax evasion! Financing terrorism!’

At first sight, people might even understand those claims and think of them as valid points in this whole discussion. Because, of course, there is a kernel of truth in those claims. Privacy coins can, of course, be used to launder money or to evade taxes. But no, it is not really happening, as various studies show. Here is the Chainalysis 2022 Crypto Crime Trends Report with a statistic featuring the share of illicit cryptocurrency transactions by year, from 2017 to 2021:

As we can see, the percentage of illicit cryptocurrency transactions went down from 1.42% in 2017 to 0.15% in 2021.

We left out 2019 intentionally, as this year was a special case. Besides the fact that it was a bear market with not much activity going on at all, it was also the year of the PlusToken scam. They got their hands on crypto-assets worth billions and dumped it on different exchanges; these transactions are responsible for the exorbitantly high share in 2019.

0.15% is not a very high score; however, it’s also important to remember this is out of all cryptocurrency transactions. The share of privacy coins only would be even lower, as most illicit transactions were on BTC and ETH.

Money Laundering & Tax Evasion: FIAT Money Still #1

One point that regulators are missing: The fact that FIAT money, the US-Dollar in particular, is still the #1 when it comes to money laundering, tax evasion, and yes, even the financing of terrorism. Let’s take a look at related news from the TradFi sector from the last years:

On February 7, 2022, news came out that revealed that Credit Suisse, one of the biggest Swiss banks, was facing money laundering charges in a Bulgarian cocaine trafficker’s trial. They allowed ‘an alleged Bulgarian cocaine trafficking gang to launder millions of euros, some of it stuffed into suitcases.’ Prosecutors were seeking around $45 million in compensation — Source Reuters

A bit earlier, on December 17, 2021, HSBC got fined more than $70 million for anti-money laundering failings. ‘The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) said weaknesses in HSBC’s financial crime safeguards had been highlighted several times before action was taken.’ — Source BBC

This is a list that could be continued for a long time. And while banks can save themselves by paying nine-figure fines, developers of open source protocols like TornadoCash are facing serious jail time. Something is very wrong here, as PriFi users are not all criminals by any means, and because there are legit use cases for privacy coins.

Privacy Coins: Legit Use Cases

Personal Freedom

Each one of us has non-negotiable freedom rights, such as the freedom of speech, religion, assembly, and so on. What do you need to actually pursue those freedom rights? When you think about it, there is just one answer: money!

Starting with the activities that are required for ‘freedom of speech’, such as: creating a website, booking advertisements, and paying graphic designers. ‘Freedom of assembly’: Paying for train tickets to go to a demonstration, booking a hotel room, getting a taxi.

All those are things which cost money. If you are not able to pay for certain goods or services, your freedom rights are being taken away. In times where governments, even of ‘democracies’, are freezing citizens’ assets for participating in a specific demonstration, privacy coins can help to maintain the ability to enforce those freedom rights.

Financial Data Protection

Using privacy coins will also help you protect your financial activity from the eyes of corporations and governments. The global ambitions to set up CBDCs (Central Bank Digital Currencies) make clear that governments are seeking more control and want to gather more data that could be used for all sorts of things.

Personal Security

For wealthy cryptocurrency investors, privacy coins can be a great option to obfuscate their money flows on-chain. However, this is currently not practicable for any amount as the liquidity won’t allow it for huge sums. Hackers who are looking for victims know their ways while using block explorers to trace back transactions and uncover affiliated wallets.

Business Privacy

If a business wants to accept cryptocurrencies as payment but goes with Bitcoin (BTC), it will face some disadvantages when it comes to the privacy of his business transactions. Clients, as well as competitors, can have a look at the business’ financial data, something no business owner wants.

PriFi: Additional Use Cases In The Navcoin Ecosystem

At Navcoin, we want to push things even further. After having developed our own privacy protocol, blsCT, we are aiming to deliver many more features beyond ‘just’ transferring funds anonymously via xNAV. Among those features are custom private tokens and the possibility to mint private NFTs:

Private Tokens

Private tokens will enable you to mint your own private tokens that then work on top of the blsCT protocol. All transactions made with these tokens are as secure and anonymous as regular xNAV transactions.

Those can be arbitrary tokens, but also tokens whose value is linked to an underlying asset/currency such as USD, EUR, or precious metals. Also possible are private tokenized in-game assets, real estate… There are really no limits.

Other blockchains, which are non-private, could gain a big advantage through facilitating the Navcoin ecosystem to give their non-anonymous tokens a fresh privacy-shield.

Private NFTs

NFTs have been the biggest hype in the crypto sector over the past two years and the trend is unlikely to go away, at least for the foreseeable future. For us, it’s not about the hype — it’s simply about promoting the maintenance of financial privacy in the NFT sector as well.

The problem is that most NFTs are mined on public blockchains like Ethereum that offer no protections for anonymized mining or payments. Anyone can examine transactions, find wallets, view assets, and draw conclusions.

On the Navcoin blockchain, you will be able to mint private NFTs. By using the blsCT privacy protocol, the transaction details (sender, receiver) will be obfuscated. The metadata of the NFT will still be public, but it will be impossible to tell who owns the NFT or from which person it was originally sent.

Conclusion: Privacy Coins & PriFi Are Needed For Legit Purposes

Privacy coins are not the devil’s work, as governments and regulators would like to make you believe. They are what cryptocurrencies were usually all about back in the day: a private, anonymous means of payment.

Over the next few years, we are expecting a higher influx of new PriFi users and are looking forward to welcoming lots of them to the Navcoin ecosystem!

Website: https://navcoin.org

Github: https://github.com/navcoin

Medium: https://navcoin.medium.com/

Discord: https://discord.com/invite/y4Vu9jw

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Navcoin

Private Finance & Regulators: About False Assumptions And Legitimate Use Cases was originally published in Navio Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Disclaimer: This article is sponsored by dYdX and contains affiliate links (that save you 5% of trading fees on dYdX; just saying)

Cryptocurrencies, starting with Bitcoin, were originally about one thing in particular: Decentralization. This ambition seems to be a bit lost nowadays. Yes, there is a new, emerging sector called ‘DeFi’ (short for ‘decentralized finance’). However, not many people seem to grasp the advantages of decentralization over centralization.

A big part of DeFi are the decentralized exchanges (DEXs). Here, users can trade in a decentralized environment with an exchange running on code (= smart contracts), and there is no central entity controlling your funds with the ability to freeze your wallets or delay withdrawals.

In this review, I will take a look at dYdX, a decentralized trading platform that supports perpetual contracts and margin trading. The fees are low and the trading interface enables you to trade in an efficient way. But first — why should you use a DEX anyway?

DEX vs. CEX

‘Not your keys, not your coins’ is more than just a sarcastic meme. It is the truth, even if it is not about misbehaviour of CEXs, per se. Lockups and long waiting times for withdrawals are experienced even on the ‘most legit’ exchanges out there, something that won’t happen when using a DEX like dYdX.

In the future, further problems might follow: our industry faces more and more regulation from government bodies worldwide. I believe in a future in which people are able to transact freely, in order to preserve their liberty rights. CEXs will have to bow down; DEXs not!

What is dYdX?

The decentralized exchange dYdX was created in 2017 by Antoni Juliano, who previously worked for Uber and Coinbase as an engineer. It supports trading of perpetual contracts with a leverage up to 20x .

The smart contracts run on Ethereum, and dYdX also uses the StarkWare layer2 solution, which enables a more efficient and less expensive trading experience due to lower fees.

Anyone can access the open-source code, thus increasing transparency and security, like most DeFi projects.

While not fully decentralized just yet (orderbook and matching engine are not), the dYdX team is on it to come up with their v4 in Q2 2023. This will be fully decentralized; every decision will be made by conducting a community vote.

According to dYdX, this really includes every decision, including ones like the recent TornadoCash scenario, in which certain wallets got blocked from using the DEX. This, however, got managed already: ‘[…] dYdX is currently blocking less than 0.1% of the wallets connected to the exchange’

dYdX on Twitter: "dYdX has updated our compliance settings to account for recent developments, and dYdX is currently blocking less than 0.1% of the wallets connected to the exchange. Read more: https://t.co/PyQpYC0KZa pic.twitter.com/GoS4LOwgLa / Twitter"

dYdX has updated our compliance settings to account for recent developments, and dYdX is currently blocking less than 0.1% of the wallets connected to the exchange. Read more: https://t.co/PyQpYC0KZa pic.twitter.com/GoS4LOwgLa

dYdX Key Features

dYdX is already used by more than 25,000 traders worldwide, with a high nine-figures daily trading volume and a TVL of almost $500M. Moreover, dYdX is backed by serious players in this space, including a16z, Kronos, and Andreessen Horowitz. Let’s take a look at the key features:

Spot & Margin Trading

dYdX works with more than 35 crypto-assets, offering spot (currently discontinued) and perpetual contracts. Among those assets that you can also trade via perpetual contract are BTC, ETH, ADA, DOGE, LINK and DOT. Perpetual trades can be executed with a leverage up to 20x.

Trading Without Gas Fees

Yes, you read right. When v4 is up and running on Cosmos, no trader on dYdX will have to pay any gas fees anymore. Currently, this is not the case on v3. However, due to the StarkWare upgrade, the fees are not that high.

dYdX v4 & dYdX chain

dYdX is currently working on its transition, meaning it is moving away from Ethereum to Cosmos and will operate fully decentralized, including off-chain orderbook and matching engine. Through working on their own chain, dYdX makes clear that they are here for the long run.

It is being built with the Cosmos SDK and a proof-of-stake consensus protocol. This way, dYdX will be part of the interconnected Cosmos ecosystem. You can find more details here in their v4 roadmap. An essential part of v4 is also the $DYDX token, which will be used by validators to secure the network via staking.

dYdX Security

You are always in control of your funds while using dYdX, as no central intermediary holds your private keys. Funds are secured by smart contracts at all times. All of their smart contracts are open source and verifiable by anyone. They got audited by PeckShield (Perpetuals Protocol on Layer 2) and Zeppelin Solutions (Perpetuals Protocol on Layer 1).

dYdX Governance

The $dYdX governance token was launched in August 2021, enabling users to earn tokens based on their trading volume. For example, dYdX holders can save up to 50% of their trading fees.

If a user wants to earn yield, he can simply stake his tokens. There are two pools: the SafetyPool, in which one can stake $dYdX, and the liquidity pool, enabling market makers to invest in the platform.

Wallets

While most users will certainly use Metamask to connect to dYdX, there are also a variety of other supported wallets, such as Ledger and Trezor hardware wallets, TrustWallet, Coinbase Wallet, or WalletConnect.

dYdX Perpetual Contracts

On dYdX, you can trade perpetual contracts with up to 20x leverage and go long or short on over 35 different crypto-assets. Traders will need to over-collateralize their loans in order to open leveraged positions and borrow assets.

On dYdX, users must deposit 125% of the loan amount before borrowing, and liquidations can occur if a 115% collateralization ratio isn’t maintained.

Getting Started on dYdX — A Quick Guide

If you want to get started with your own dYdX account, feel free to follow the steps described below. It is really easy and takes hardly any time to do.

First, you have to sign up. For this purpose, visit dydx.exchange:

Next, you have to click on ‘Connect wallet’ in the top right. As for most DeFi applications, you can choose between different wallets, such as MetaMask, Trust Wallet, or imToken:

While linking your wallet to your dYdX account, you have to verify the ownership. Click ‘send requests’ and you will just have to confirm in your Metamask.

You will also get asked to sign the dYdX STARK key. StarkWare has a partnership with dYdX, collaborating on the Layer 2 scaling solution for perpetual contracts, based on the StarkEx scalability engine — which leads to lower gas fees when using dYdX:

Now your dYdX account is ready. You always have everything on your radar via the ‘Portfolio’ section, like portfolio value, margin usage and free collateral, positions, open orders, and trading history:

On the bottom left, you will find two buttons: ‘Withdraw’ and ‘Deposit’. Here is the deposit menu:

With your preferred asset(s) deposited, you can start to check out the trading section. The trading interface is great:

Conclusion

In my opinion, decentralization is the real deal and something we should all focus on. dYdX is a great solution for trading perpetual contracts of crypto-assets, or crypto-assets on margin — on a decentralized exchange (DEX)! While they are not operating fully decentralized just yet, this will soon be the case when dYdX v4 is launched.

From there on, every (!) decision regarding the dYdX exchange will be made by the community, including regarding new markets, or on delicate questions like whether a certain wallet should be banned because it had a touchpoint with Tornado Cash or similar.

If you are interested in checking out dYdX, here you go — with my referral link, you will also get 5% discount on your trading fees: Trade on dYdX!

Financial privacy is critical to individual freedom, yet is still non-existent for most digital currencies. Without privacy, your entire net worth would be exposed for anyone to see after just one trip to the grocery store.

Navcoin is a medium of exchange that doesn’t compromise your privacy and protects all transaction details by hiding the sender and receiver, as well as the amount of coins sent.

Moreover we are working on innovative features such as private tokens and private NFTs, bringing privacy to non-private chains.

On August 10 we hosted an AMA (Ask Me Anything) with our main developer aguycalled in our Discord community. We thank all participants for their questions and hope that the answers clarified some things!

If you were not able to participate when it happened, do not worry, in this recap you will find out about the different questions and answers.

Minor spelling errors got corrected, but no grammar mistakes. Everything is almost as it was posted in Discord; you can also join it and check the #ama channel. Questions and answers are categorised by:

• Navcoin Development/Tech
• Navcoin Products/Use Cases
• Privacy Coins/PriFi in General
• Others

Between the questions & answers you will also find some notes with further information/links that might come in handy for you.

Let’s go!

Navcoin Development/Tech

Note: If you are new to Navcoin, it makes sense to dig into our knowledge base first.

Q: Have we ever done or can we make a stress test of the network?

A: I remember someone at Encrypt-S (the NZ team who was leading Navcoin’s development back in 2018) did a stress test on a simulated network and that’s where the number of ~1000 TPS (which has been commented in online forums) is coming from.

When this stress test was done, BLSCT did not exist, so that number is not valid anymore. BLS signatures and Bulletproofs are more compute- and space-intensive than ECDSA.

A new stress test for the new fully private chain would make a lot of sense and I would vote yes for funding the task with the Community Fund.

Q: What are the development plans for the foreseeable and long term future?

A: The main focus of the core team hasn’t been modified: at the moment it is the transition to a fully private chain. Gogoex and mxaddict keep on migrating the current feature set to the new codebase. Related to this, during this first week of August, I’ve been busy drafting a specification for the xNAV POS protocol. I will share this soon publicly for feedback.

Once Binance removes our trading pair, I expect PancakeSwap to be our main trading venue and the bridge becoming a more important piece of our infrastructure. So during this week I am also spending a considerable part of my time on the bridge, optimising it for smoother deposits and withdrawals to Binance Smart Chain. I will also soon start adding support for wrapping BEP-20 tokens as Private Tokens.

I would like to integrate PancakeSwap trading and wrapping of private tokens on the Whisper wallet too.

Besides those things, which depend directly on me, there are more areas where I expect to see significant progress. Like Priverse, the NFT marketplace, or the Chrome extension, which are developed by sakdeniz.

Note: Current developments can be tracked on our roadmap.

Q: Would Navcoin be developed without you?

A: I’d assume if I’d disappear from the face of earth tomorrow, others would step in and continue the work. But it’s impossible to answer with certainty.

Q: Can we build more development teams to make the nav even more decentralized?

A: We already have other community members like sakdeniz working autonomously in their own projects (NEXT, Priverse, Chrome extension).

I would love to see that happening every time more often and with more contributors, but this is something that doesn’t depend on my will but on the own initiative of others.

Q: Any idea for a Python developer to contribute?

A: NavCash and the electrum servers are written in Python. They are both open source, there’s nothing stopping you from contributing your ideas to both repositories.

Writing an equivalent SDK to navcoin-js in Python would also be an interesting and valuable contribution.

Note: If you are a developer and want to contribute to the Navcoin ecosystem, here you go.

Q: Is there a need to change blocktime from 30 sec. to 1 or 2 Minutes because of NFT as a private token?

A: There is not a need, but it is something that might make sense to consider in my opinion.

Q: Why does Navcoin want to become 100% private? (rather than giving users a choice between public and private transactions as is the case now)

A: As a privacy coin, our goal must be to offer the best privacy we can. A mixed model causes leaks when moving from private to public or private to public, highly reducing the privacy level we can offer and making it easier to trace back transactions.

Q: Can you elaborate further on why increasing the block time could make sense?

A: We will need to stress test the network and choose a number which ensures full blocks with the new xNAV proof of stake protocol and which are only using BLSCT (which is more intensive as ECDSA) can be validated on time without excessive hardware requirements.

Q: Can you talk a bit about the benefits of a private PoS chain?

A: The main motivation for transitioning to a private PoS chain is removing the need for public coins, which reduces the level of privacy we can offer.

Q: On the same line, what effect do you think a private PoS chain could have on governance compared to governance on a public chain?

A: I think votes might be more genuine, as in public chains, sometimes people’s vote is influenced by the fact that their vote will be connected with their public identity, if their addresses leaked and are known.

Navcoin Trading

Q: With Binance out of the picture, what can we do to lower the entry barrier for newcomers as well as providing enough liquidity for a healthy trading environment?

A: From the development side I think that improving the experience of using the Bridge is very important so users can seamlessly continue trading NAV in PancakeSwap, which as I said, I expect to become the main trading venue for NAV.

Probably there is more to do related to this in other areas of the project, like marketing or bizdev, but here it must be others who answer the question.

Note: If you have never traded on Pancakeswap, here we published a tutorial on how to use it to trade Navcoin. Further tutorials, i.e. for AtomicDEX, are coming next week.

Navcoin Products/Use Cases

Q: With private tokens online, do we have plans to attract others or build our own wrapped private tokens for both stable coins and native tokens?

A: Yes, we should soon have the option to wrap private tokens in the Bridge.

And I think we should create technical documentations so others can implement alternative uses of the tech and the on-chain atomic trade capabilities. This should attract others to build on top of the BLSCT private tokens.

Q: If NAV is 100% privat and xNAV are stakable, can we detect a inflationbug easy?

A: If we are fully private, an inflation bug would be harder to detect than with a mixed public-private model.

Q: Will every other token on BSC/PancakeSwap be able to use NAV as a private chain? And /or can it be pooled with NAV?

A: My idea is that we will start enabling wrapping of some tokens (BUSD, BTCB, BNB) and then expand to every other token.

Q: There are plans for adding a private token equivalent to USDT or another stable coin?

A: I think what makes more sense is to start wrapping BUSD as a private token, so we would have a stable coin backed by BUSD.

Private Finance in General

Note: If you are still a newbie when it comes to the topic of private finance, feel free to read some of our articles which will help you to better understand the need of PriFi and ecosystems like Navcoin:

• The Destruction of Financial Privacy — PriFi & Navcoin to The Rescue
• How Financial Privacy Impacts Your Freedom

Q: How do privacy coins survive in an ever-increasing regulatory environment? (E.g. if the use of privacy coins is made illegal, how will Navcoin’s team continue its contributions when doing so could make them a target for prosecution)

A: I suggest to read the DarkFi manifesto, it answers this question better than I could do myself

Q: Thinking ahead to a time, where crypto transactions are more mainstream, do you envision the majority of transactions being private?

A: I fear that might be wishful thinking in the current paradigm we live in. I expect more people will want to use privacy-enhancing tools in the future, the more that personal rights are restricted.

But I also think a majority of the people tend to comply and are happy delegating responsibilities. We should be ready to be used by a majority if they need to use us, but I don’t think that mass adoption should be our main goal.

Q: Do you think the use of private transactions will increase slowly over the years through education, or will the increase be rapid and desperate following a sudden regulatory change?

A: I think at some point the use of privacy-enhancing tools will increase exponentially, maybe through a sudden regulatory change, maybe through some event like the Snowden leaks we had in the past.

Others

Q: To increase the visibility of NAV are we planning to sponsor or partner with like minded softwares or institutions or conferences etc. at any point in future?

A: I completely support this. I already expressed my opinion publicly on the marketing channel, and I also did it privately to those working on the marketing side. It depends on them to do it if they consider it to be a good idea.

Q: There are companies that do a blockchain protocol security audit…Do you think it would bring more trust and credibility by getting audited?

A: Yes, I think that makes a lot of sense. Especially for the new chain once we complete the work to transition to be fully private.

Q: Can you speak on current doa proposals/payment requests? Maybe provide details on why we should support them with a yes vote, or a no?

A: I agree with what @ML wrote, everyone should vote following their own opinion.

In general I think I’ve expressed my personal opinion already on public channels.

For the sakdeniz proposal I think at the moment he did it it was too early for a full payment — I would have supported it if it was a partial payment.

Related to the GSR payment request — I am not voting no to it yet, but I personally don’t think that it makes sense to print 3mill coins for market making without Binance or other considerable CEX.

We have conversations for listings in other CEXs at the moment, but I don’t know if they will succeed. In my opinion, our priority should be to integrate further in DEXs and not spend many resources in CEXs.

More AMA’s Will Follow!

Navcoin Discord AMA — Recap was originally published in Navio Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In recent weeks, the cryptocurrency markets witnessed a lot of turmoil with prices crashing across the board. Bitcoin went further down than its previous cycle high of roughly $19,500 and Ethereum also had to struggle, reaching lows below $1,000.

While a lot of players got wiped out or significantly hurt and not all of them will be around a few years from now, it is time to dig into the fundamentals of this market; as there is one niche in particular that deserves more attention: Privacy coins.

If you were around for a longer time you might have heard of those ‘special’ cryptocurrencies that are enabling their users to maintain their financial privacy through obfuscating transaction data such as sender, receiver, and amount of transacted coins.

However, so far not that many people are active in this space. Too few people are aware of the problems that we, as a society, might face over the next few years and why privacy coins could become a very important tool.

In this article, I will dig into the privacy coin landscape, as ‘PriFi’ (Private Finance) is finally about to emerge. I will talk about what privacy coins essentially are, how they work, what advantages and disadvantages they have, and how the project I am working for, Navcoin, is sticking out.

What Are Privacy Coins?

The term ‘privacy coins’ might ring some bells if you have already one or two years crypto-experience under your belt. However, a lot of people have never heard of them. Or, if they did, they just scratched the surface.

Privacy coins, in general, are all cryptocurrencies that do not reveal any transaction data, such as sender/receiver, as well as the amount sent. This is a big difference compared to traditional cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. While there is no personal data attached to each transaction, Bitcoin is far from being anonymous and is pseudonymous at its best.

On Twitter there is a great demonstration, showing what kind of data can be gathered through blockchain analysis. The results are astonishing:

https://twitter.com/namsardar/status/1535874995590778882

At the end of the day, most people bought their Bitcoin on a centralized exchange, after doing a KYC most of the time. This means that from this point on, every transaction can be traced back to the origin. There are some anonymizing services called Bitcoin mixers, but they just add extra hassle and only work to a certain extent.

As said, privacy coins are putting an end to this. One can be really anonymous and move funds freely by using them,, without anyone being able to trace transactions back, tell who sent something to whom, or how much.

Privacy Coins: Pros and Cons

Pros:

• Anonymity: Obviously, being anonymous and protecting one’s privacy is the main argument for using privacy coins, as they ensure private transactions; a basic right that every human deserves to exercise.
• Security: Anonymity always gives you security; it does not matter if you are handling a business, are an investigative journalist, or an oppressed (by your government) citizen.

Cons:

• Fees: Privacy coin transactions are bigger because of their design and all the privacy features that come with it. This leads to higher transaction fees than for Bitcoin, for example.
• Bad Reputation: Privacy coins have a bad reputation. This is also the fault of mainstream media and regulators, who like to point out that those coins could be used for illegal things. That this is the natural domain of FIAT money, they leave out conveniently.

In sum, the advantages outweigh the disadvantages by far. What we are facing in this sector is literally coordinated FUD (“fear, uncertainty, distraction”) by players such as the (central-)banking sector, ‘economy experts’, and a well-oiled mass media machinery.

It reminds one of all the articles about Bitcoin in the early days, which invented reasons to criticise it -it is still like this today- and the attempts to weaken a growing danger for the international monetary system.

How Are Privacy Coins Working?

Besides the technology that gives privacy coins their privacy, they are pretty much regular cryptocurrencies, just like Bitcoin. They also run on decentralised ledgers (= the blockchain) while the network is maintained by a group of validators.

To see what makes the Navcoin ecosystem unique, let’s check first how the biggest privacy coins, Monero (XMR) and Zcash (ZEC) function:

Monero

Monero belongs to the category of privacy coins with non-optional privacy. This simply means every transaction is anonymous. By contrast, Zcash works differently. Here you have the option to turn the privacy features on and off.

Monero uses ‘stealth addresses’, ‘ring signatures’ and ‘ringCT’. Stealth addresses are automatically created for each transaction. A ‘one-time key’ determines the recipient of the transaction. Outsiders, however, cannot do anything with this key.

The public key for sending and the key for viewing are formed from the 95 characters of a Monero wallet. When a transaction is made, arbitrary data is added to create a new key, which in turn can be used to issue the XMR.

The private key in the wallet then ensures that the coins sent arrive in the correct wallet and can also be spent. This means the following: 1) private keys are never visible on the blockchain; 2) the recipient protects his privacy; 3) only the transaction can be traced by other people who have the private key to view it.

Ring signatures consist of different components, each of which has the same value. Only one part is the valid signature of the person who sent XMR.

All others are randomly drawn from older transactions on the blockchain. It cannot be determined which signature is from the sender. Ring CTs (CT = Confidential Transaction) ensure that there is no information on the blockchain about how many XMR were sent in a transaction.

The sum of the inputs is always equal to the output. The total credit is always made up of different inputs. If you have an input of 8 XMR and want to send 6 XMR, the complete input is divided into two outputs (1. 6 XMR transaction output; 2. 2 XMR bill of exchange output). A range proof ensures that the amount of a transaction exceeds zero.

Zcash

Zcash is a bit younger than Monero and was founded in 2016, originally started as ‘Zerocoin’ which led to the ‘Zerocash’ system. Today it is widely known as ‘Zcash’. It is a Bitcoin fork, while Monero works with the CryptoNote protocol.

To ensure their privacy features, the Zcash developers had to make optimizations of the Bitcoin codebase. Their focus was the addition of so-called ‘zero-knowledge proofs’ in short ‘zk-SNARKS’. They are used to conceal both the sending and receiving address, plus the transaction amount.

How Navcoin Sticks Out

Navcoin is truly one of the oldest privacy-oriented projects in existence. Since its launch in 2016, which happened without an ICO or any pre-mine, it was developed consequently further. While being focussed on the ‘private cash’ use case, Navcoin is today much more than that; and compares favourably against other privacy projects, such as Zcash and Monero which were mentioned above:

After developing its own privacy protocol, blsCT, Navcoin is aiming to deliver many more features beyond ‘just’ transferring funds anonymously. Among those features are custom private tokens and the possibility to mint private NFTs; more in this regard later in this article. First, here is an introduction regarding the blsCT protocol.

blsCT Protocol

The blsCT protocol is a development of the Navcoin core team. It combines Boneh-Lynn-Shacham (BLS) signatures and confidential transactions (CTs), which encrypt transaction amounts. The BLS signatures have been around since 2001, and are used to enable a group of signatures to be compressed into a compact one that can be used to authenticate the entire group.

‘NavCoin’s blsCT innovates by combining both methods to create a new protocol which allows mixing inputs from different transactions while keeping the amounts hidden in a trustless way, backed by mathematics.’

https://medium.com/nav-coin/navcoin-an-established-history-of-innovation-8c702178e32c

blsCT is confidential, untraceable, and unlinkable. On top of providing sufficient privacy, blsCT transactions are also scalable and quick to create.

1. blsCT transactions are aggregatable

• Two blsCT transactions can be merged in one blsCT transaction.
• An observer can’t tell if a transaction has been aggregated or not.
• Transactions can be aggregated infinite times.

1. Aggregated blsCT transactions are good for privacy

• blsCT hides the transaction amounts. When two transactions are aggregated and their inputs are mixed, an observer can’t tell which inputs pay which outputs!

2. blsCT helps scalability

• Only one signature is needed for each block, instead of needing one signature for each input.

3. Liquidity providers can earn money

• Nodes can earn coins by offering their coins for mixing, thus participating in the aggregation market.

You can find a diagram showing how it works in more detail on https://info.navcoin.org/general-support/blsct/, as well as more information regarding the consensus mechanism, staking, etc. — in case you have any questions you can always feel free to drop by our Discord, too.

NAV, xNAV, wNAV

The Navcoin ecosystem works with three currencies, namely NAV, xNAV and wNAV. While they all play an important role in the network, NAV is the public currency for fast, low-cost payments, and for maintenance of the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism.

xNAV, on the other side, is the private currency that protects sensitive information, like who the sender and who the receiver are. wNAV as the third currency is a wrapped up representation of NAV or xNAV and allows users to interact with other blockchains. NAV, as well as xNAV, can be swapped 1:1 for wNAV.

Private Tokens & Private NFTs: Launch on July 25 2022

Private cash is the main focus of any PriFi project. While this makes complete sense, as it is obviously the largest and most-needed use case, there are other things we are working on at Navcoin. Multiple developments will change the private finance landscape, as we ramp up solutions that have never been seen before.

Private Tokens

Private tokens are one of our most important features and will be introduced July 25. Through private tokens in the Navcoin ecosystem, it is possible to mine your own private tokens that work on top of our blsCT protocol. All transactions made with these tokens are as secure and anonymous as regular (x)NAV transactions.

When you think about it, the possibilities are endless. One could create arbitrary tokens, but also tokens correlating with other underlying assets or currencies, i.e. USD or gold. Moreover, it is also possible to use them for the tokenization of in-game assets/items in upcoming cryptocurrency-games. It will also bring our privacy properties to chains and tokens that are naturally lacking such; a game changer!

Private NFTs

Also, NFTs have been the biggest hype in the crypto sector over the past two years and the trend is unlikely to go away, at least for the foreseeable future. For us, it’s not about the hype — it’s simply about promoting the maintenance of financial privacy in the NFT sector as well.

The problem is that most NFTs are mined on public blockchains like Ethereum that offer no protections for anonymized mining or payments. Anyone can examine transactions, find wallets, view assets, and draw conclusions.

On the Navcoin blockchain, you will be able to mine private NFTs in the future. By using the blsCT privacy protocol, the transaction details (sender, receiver) will be obfuscated. The metadata of the NFT will still be public, but it will be impossible to tell who owns the NFT or from which person it was originally sent.

Conclusion

Compared to other categories in the cryptocurrency market, the privacy coin/private finance niche is still pretty small. Besides the few big names around (Monero, Zcash) there are hardly any projects getting major traction — so far!

One of the biggest problems is that the average cryptocurrency user, not even considering people who are not into it at all, simply does not see the need. However, with recent developments worldwide, one could think this is about to change soon. While some will understand it early, some others will have to learn it the hard way.

The upcoming Navcoin releases, starting July 25, such as bringing privacy to non-private blockchains, will be one step closer to mass adoption. It will grow within the community before making the jump into the mainstream at some point. If you want to follow up on what we are building and join our community, see our link list here:

Website: https://navcoin.org

Github: https://github.com/navcoin

Medium: https://navcoin.medium.com/

Discord: https://discord.com/invite/y4Vu9jw

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Navcoin

‘It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.’ — 1984, George Orwell

Anyone who has read 1984 will often have to wipe their eyes when they read the news these days. The then-dystopian scenario that sometimes made your blood run cold is today nothing more than a signpost from the past for the future, i.e. our present.

In recent months and years, one could observe how the efforts for more surveillance are increasing more and more. Of course, one thing plays a central role in this: money.

Governments, regulators, authorities — they are all interested in storing and evaluating the financial transactions of their citizens and making various decisions based on the results. This includes further tracking of individuals, freezing of assets, and thus, an encroachment on the freedom of every citizen.

In this article I would like to show you the concrete problems we are facing — and how the Navcoin ecosystem can help you to get out of the loop before it becomes a problem.

‘Wait, wait, wait — Bitcoin does not fix this?’

Unfortunately, the answer to this question is a strict ‘No!’. In the year 2022, even many advanced people in this industry are not aware of the fact that Bitcoin is pseudonymous but not anonymous. Satoshi also knew this, and even stated it in one of the first Bitcoin whitepapers.

Every blockchain transaction leaves a trace and can never be edited or deleted; every transaction is stored forever and enables three-letter agencies, governments and other official bodies to trace them back. This is not just the case for Bitcoin transactions but also Ethereum transactions; every non-private public blockchain is affected by this.

While there are ways to obfuscate those traces (i.e. Bitcoin mixers like Coinjoin or TornadoCash on Ethereum), those services come with extra steps, making it harder to use for the average user.

FIAT-World: Governments freezing assets

For a lot of folks, it is just hard to grasp such a scenario. ‘My government is freezing my assets? No way, I am not a criminal!’

This is the problem, however: that even western governments are starting to seize their citizens’ assets when they are NOT part of any criminal actions.

One of the best examples from recent times comes from Canada. To demonstrate against government measures, a group of truckers started a protest that quickly expanded, ending in the ‘siege’ of Ottawa. One of those measures was the Mareva injunction signed by the Ontario Superior Court of Justice. This allowed the government to freeze more than 120 Crypto-Wallets, as well as donations that were collected on GoFundMe.

Affected persons had to respond to the court within a week in order to give details about the origin of the seized assets, as well as what their intended purpose was; a violation of the presumption of innocence principle: A person is innocent until proven guilty.

The probability is high that we will see things like this happening again and again.

CBDC Implementation Worldwide

You probably heard it more often over the last years: CBDC. This is short for Central Bank Digital Currency and represents the digital form of FIAT money that is used in one particular nation or region. It is issued by the country’s central bank just as regular FIAT currencies are.

Central banks and regulators see in CBDCs their answer to cryptocurrencies, which are threatening their power monopoly. When it comes to the development of cashless societies, and thus societies threatened by increasing surveillance, CBDCs are playing a major role.

Centralized Stablecoins (USDT)

By today, the stablecoin USDT (Tether) has a market capitalization of roughly $70 Billion, thus making it the biggest stablecoin by this metric. One of the biggest problems of USDT is the fact that wallets can be frozen by a central entity.

In the past, this was the case when hackers converted funds to USDT and moved it around, just to see their wallets being frozen shortly after. While this might be understandable in such a case, it exposes a risk — what if government bodies will pressure Tether in the future to freeze wallets of ‘unlovable citizens’? Citizens who did nothing wrong per se, other than being an eyesore for a few powerful people…

You want freedom? You need a private finance ecosystem!

What is it worth to live in a ‘democracy’, having rights to speech, religion, assembly and so on — when those basic rights are getting violated by the very powers that should protect them? What are they worth when they are violated, citizens punished, without even having a trial in front of court? Those who have been following the news over the last months and years will have to realise that this is happening more and more; i.e. bank accounts and crypto wallets being frozen just because people donated to a non-violent demonstration.

‘So what do you need to actually pursue those freedom rights? When you think about it, there is just one answer: money! Starting with the activities that are required for ‘freedom of speech’, such as: creating a website, booking an advertisement, and paying graphic designers. ‘Freedom of assembly’: Paying for train tickets to go to a demonstration, booking a hotel room, getting a taxi. All those are things which cost money. If you are not able to pay for certain goods or services, your freedom rights are getting taken away.’ — https://medium.com/@cryptonator1337/how-financial-privacy-impacts-your-freedom-cc0ebdf74ed6

Facing the new developments of CBDCs, one has to be even more cautious. When all money is digital and cash money forbidden, it is nothing but a short road to complete surveillance of any financial transaction — of anyone. The ones responsible claim to address problems such as terrorism, money laundering and tax evasion, yet FIAT money is the number one in this regard.

Navcoin’s Mission

At Navcoin, we value human rights and are willing to fight for them. With our technological inventions, i.e. the blsCT protocol, we are able to offer a complete private finance (PriFi) ecosystem, enabling our users to use private cash. Transactions are fast and easy to do via our new Whisper Wallet.

Moreover, after a community decision, we will activate two of our main features: private tokens and private NFTs. We will also bring our privacy technology to non-private chains, enabling, for example, the private trading of ERC20 or BSC tokens. If you are interested in protecting your financial privacy, feel free to dig in further and join our community!

Links

Website: https://navcoin.org

Github: https://github.com/navcoin

Medium: https://navcoin.medium.com/

Discord: https://discord.com/invite/y4Vu9jw

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Navcoin

Coingecko: https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/navcoin

The Destruction of Financial Privacy — PriFi & Navcoin to The Rescue was originally published in Navio Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

‘It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.’ — 1984, George Orwell

Anyone who has read 1984 will often have to wipe their eyes when they read the news these days. The then-dystopian scenario that sometimes made your blood run cold is today nothing more than a signpost from the past for the future, i.e. our present.

In recent months and years, one could observe how the efforts for more surveillance are increasing more and more. Of course, one thing plays a central role in this: money.

Governments, regulators, authorities — they are all interested in storing and evaluating the financial transactions of their citizens and making various decisions based on the results. This includes further tracking of individuals, freezing of assets, and thus, an encroachment on the freedom of every citizen.

In this article I would like to show you the concrete problems we are facing — and how the Navcoin ecosystem can help you to get out of the loop before it becomes a problem.

‘Wait, wait, wait — Bitcoin does not fix this?’

Unfortunately, the answer to this question is a strict ‘No!’. In the year 2022, even many advanced people in this industry are not aware of the fact that Bitcoin is pseudonymous but not anonymous. Satoshi also knew this, and even stated it in one of the first Bitcoin whitepapers.

Every blockchain transaction leaves a trace and can never be edited or deleted; every transaction is stored forever and enables three-letter agencies, governments and other official bodies to trace them back. This is not just the case for Bitcoin transactions but also Ethereum transactions; every non-private public blockchain is affected by this.

While there are ways to obfuscate those traces (i.e. Bitcoin mixers like Coinjoin or TornadoCash on Ethereum), those services come with extra steps, making it harder to use for the average user.

FIAT-World: Governments freezing assets

For a lot of folks, it is just hard to grasp such a scenario. ‘My government is freezing my assets? No way, I am not a criminal!’

This is the problem, however: that even western governments are starting to seize their citizens’ assets when they are NOT part of any criminal actions.

One of the best examples from recent times comes from Canada. To demonstrate against government measures, a group of truckers started a protest that quickly expanded, ending in the ‘siege’ of Ottawa. One of those measures was the Mareva injunction signed by the Ontario Superior Court of Justice. This allowed the government to freeze more than 120 Crypto-Wallets, as well as donations that were collected on GoFundMe.

Affected persons had to respond to the court within a week in order to give details about the origin of the seized assets, as well as what their intended purpose was; a violation of the presumption of innocence principle: A person is innocent until proven guilty.

The probability is high that we will see things like this happening again and again.

CBDC Implementation Worldwide

You probably heard it more often over the last years: CBDC. This is short for Central Bank Digital Currency and represents the digital form of FIAT money that is used in one particular nation or region. It is issued by the country’s central bank just as regular FIAT currencies are.

Central banks and regulators see in CBDCs their answer to cryptocurrencies, which are threatening their power monopoly. When it comes to the development of cashless societies, and thus societies threatened by increasing surveillance, CBDCs are playing a major role.

Centralized Stablecoins (USDT)

By today, the stablecoin USDT (Tether) has a market capitalization of roughly $70 Billion, thus making it the biggest stablecoin by this metric. One of the biggest problems of USDT is the fact that wallets can be frozen by a central entity.

In the past, this was the case when hackers converted funds to USDT and moved it around, just to see their wallets being frozen shortly after. While this might be understandable in such a case, it exposes a risk — what if government bodies will pressure Tether in the future to freeze wallets of ‘unlovable citizens’? Citizens who did nothing wrong per se, other than being an eyesore for a few powerful people…

You want freedom? You need a private finance ecosystem!

What is it worth to live in a ‘democracy’, having rights to speech, religion, assembly and so on — when those basic rights are getting violated by the very powers that should protect them? What are they worth when they are violated, citizens punished, without even having a trial in front of court? Those who have been following the news over the last months and years will have to realise that this is happening more and more; i.e. bank accounts and crypto wallets being frozen just because people donated to a non-violent demonstration.

‘So what do you need to actually pursue those freedom rights? When you think about it, there is just one answer: money! Starting with the activities that are required for ‘freedom of speech’, such as: creating a website, booking an advertisement, and paying graphic designers. ‘Freedom of assembly’: Paying for train tickets to go to a demonstration, booking a hotel room, getting a taxi. All those are things which cost money. If you are not able to pay for certain goods or services, your freedom rights are getting taken away.’ — https://medium.com/@cryptonator1337/how-financial-privacy-impacts-your-freedom-cc0ebdf74ed6

Facing the new developments of CBDCs, one has to be even more cautious. When all money is digital and cash money forbidden, it is nothing but a short road to complete surveillance of any financial transaction — of anyone. The ones responsible claim to address problems such as terrorism, money laundering and tax evasion, yet FIAT money is the number one in this regard.

Navcoin’s Mission

At Navcoin, we value human rights and are willing to fight for them. With our technological inventions, i.e. the blsCT protocol, we are able to offer a complete private finance (PriFi) ecosystem, enabling our users to use private cash. Transactions are fast and easy to do via our new Whisper Wallet. Moreover, after a community decision, we will activate two of our main features: private tokens and private NFTs. We will also bring our privacy technology to non-private chains, enabling, for example, the private trading of ERC20 or BSC tokens. If you are interested in protecting your financial privacy, feel free to dig in further and join our community!

Links

Website: https://navcoin.org

Github: https://github.com/navcoin

Medium: https://navcoin.medium.com/

Discord: https://discord.com/invite/y4Vu9jw

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Navcoin

Coingecko: https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/navcoin