New Privacy Mechanism For ETH Smart Contracts Developed By Stanford Researchers

Stanford University researchers are in our blockchain news today after partnering with VISA research to develop a privacy mechanism for ETH smart contracts according to a published paper on the university’s applied cryptography group website.

The paper notes that the researches created a fully-decentralized mechanism that is confidentially called ‘’Zether’’. The developers developed a new smart contract that can be executed by other smart contracts or individually and at the same time is able to maintain the account balances encrypted.

The authors of the paper claim that Zether transactions are confidential and one transaction costs about $1.51. Users will be able to lock funds in the account to the smart contract and according to the report:

 “We describe an extension to Zether that can also hide the sender and receiver involved in a transaction among a group of users chosen by the sender. Though the overhead associated with anonymity scales linearly with the size of the group, no trusted set-up is needed and no changes to the underlying smart contract platform are required.”

The report specifies that the Zether contract will never transfer funds without checking a transfer proof in order to prevent illegal transfers. This new design makes sure that the security of Zether depends on itself and not on third-parties or outside smart contracts.

All of the privacy coins that provide users with a higher level of anonymity are still receiving mixed feelings from the community. For example, Charlie Lee declared he is focused on making Litecoin more fungible and private and to implement confidential transactions sometime in 2019.