This Platform Could Soon Enable Privacy for Bitcoin and Other Public Blockchains

On the 6th of January 2021, an attack on the US Capitol would become one of the most widely documented acts of political violence in history. Following the groundbreaking incident, where a violent group of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol, Facebook made an unprecedented announcement that it would be banning the US president from its platform and subsidiary, Instagram.

Platforms like Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, Twitch, TikTok, Snapchat, and Discord soon followed suit, banning accounts and groups affiliated with Trump and misinformation about the 2020 presidential election.

To many, this was a welcome reaction to Trump’s efforts to undermine confidence in the election, however, for Republicans, it was seen as a bid from tech companies to silence conservative voices. Fast forward to nearly a year later, and “shadowbans” aka “ghost banning” or “stealth banning”, where certain social media content is blocked from receiving views, likes, and traffic, is pervading platforms.

From a privacy standpoint, this is setting a dangerous precedent, as the strongest societies are built upon solid principles of transparency and freedom of expression. It ultimately creates uncertainty on the size and direction of the problem, which could potentially lead to users getting banned for various other reasons, such as political affiliation or their financial history.

In response, the crypto industry is one of the sectors which has started to forge ahead with technology geared towards enhancing privacy. One example of this is Findora, a blockchain that was created specifically to improve privacy. The platform recently announced its $100 million ecosystem fund which will be utilized to accelerate its growth and development.

Then there are privacy coins, a class of cryptocurrency that protects the origin and destination of blockchain transactions. Privacy coins achieve ‘complete privacy’ by obscuring a user’s real wallet balance and address. In traditional finance, this is near impossible, as there is almost always a record of the interaction, transaction or receiving of the payment, product or service.

The rise in privacy coins has emerged as Bitcoin and many other public blockchains allow anyone to view public addresses and transactions in their network. This makes it easy to track deposits and withdrawals.

Although Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are predominantly perceived as anonymous, Bitcoin is actually pseudonymous. This means its transactions are stored on a public ledger, making it a transparent method of sending money, but under a pseudonym. So while someone’s full name will never be connected to a transaction, it might be possible through analysis to identify and profile an individual based on spending habits associated with one or more public addresses on the network. An example of this, is if an NFT was purchased for the equivalent of $1 million, using Ethereum, and paid to a specific address, one could look for transactions of this nature, and together with other publicly available information, gain a better understanding of who might have purchased that specific NFT. Being able to deduce who the person is behind the pseudonym address could become a huge issue if you as the user wish to remain anonymous.

This can be further exploited and used to really delve into a person’s spending habits, actions and life choices. If an individual has a public address on one of their social accounts and transacts with other wallet addresses of theirs (for instance, ones containing their salary), access to their spending habits, lifestyle choices, and other compromising information is suddenly accessible to the public.

With minimal investigation, frequency and balances, which are all transparently available on the public blockchain, can easily be identified. Privacy coins, on the other hand, were created to keep information about its users concealed, including their private transactions and private wallet addresses, without any means to deduce transaction details. This is of course, unless they choose to reveal it, for example, for tax purposes.

As the right to privacy gains momentum, tools must be created to allow individuals the ability to exercise that right. One such project, Navcoin ($NAV), has developed a novel privacy protocol called blsCT that serves as the backbone to their privacy coin ⏤ a medium of exchange that protects transaction details such as the origin, destination and value transferred.

The core mission of Navcoin is to provide people with privacy-preserving solutions allowing them to control the access to their personal and financial data. Navcoin believes that privacy is a fundamental human right and that everyone should be given the opportunity to transact as they desire and without the fear of being watched, profiled or discriminated against in the context of an increasingly more invasive world.

With Navcoin rooted in privacy, they have recently announced their move to become a high-utility privacy platform that new and existing projects can use to obtain privacy. As part of that, they are introducing the ability to mint private tokens as well as non-fungible tokens (NFTs) with the same privacy-preserving properties as Navcoin itself, thus enabling Bitcoin and other public blockchains to obtain privacy through a private token pegged to its own asset.

The concern around privacy is an ongoing issue which is only likely to grow. Navcoin has the potential to provide a solution for this complex problem.