Guy Zyskind, a co-founder of SecretNetwork and Secret Lab, Explains SecretNetwork, its use cases, and areas of differences and advantages over other Blockchain networks.
This is an opportunity to learn SecretNetwork, the reason for its development, the importance of privacy in web3, and more from Guy Zyskind himself as this post summarizes Coin Gecko’s talk with SecretNetwork Co-founder, giving clear details of the areas of discussion in the podcast.
These are the summary of questions asked by Ben of Coingecko and answers given by Guy Zyskind of Secret labs.
What Exactly is SecretNetwork?
Generally speaking, SecretNetwork is an L1 Blockchain with a smart-contract very much like Ethereum, Solana, Terra but it has one uniqueness that other networks don’t have, and that is programmable privacy(basically, the ability to keep everything done in a smart-contract private where input and output of any function are encrypted). An analogy to explain this is essentially what Monero and Zcash do to Bitcoin with private transactions, SecretNetwork does that with smart chain contracts like Ethereum. Therefore, it’s a privacy to the smart-contract, not just transactions.
It’s presumed that cryptocurrencies generally are about privacy, so what’s the level of SecretNetwork privacy compared to other coins like Ethereum?
Let’s say there are 3 levels of privacy. Transaction privacy which is provided by Monero and Zcash, pseudonym which relates to the crypto public key, and programmable privacy provided by SecretNetwork.
· Transaction privacy makes private the sender, receiver, and the amount involved.
· Pseudonym privacy is the type that most cryptocurrencies Blockchain offer with the pseudo address provided for users to transact. For instance, a particular wallet address doesn’t carry the name of its owner. Notwithstanding, all transactions done by this address are not private. They can be seen by anyone because they operate on a Blockchain that’s public by default, like Bitcoin, Ethereum Solana, and the likes. Wallets from those chains can be scanned to get what they’re holding and this cannot be called privacy.
· Programmable privacy is what SecretNetwork is all about. You can keep secret not just who you are, your transactions and address but anything! And usually anything in the business logic that an application needs. For instance, if a poker game is created on another Blockchain besides SecretNetwork, the Blockchain smart-contract shuffles and determines who wins but if players can actually see each other’s cards, then there’s no game. So programmable privacy gives this high level of privacy that any application needs.
What is the Difference between SecretNetwork and Monero & Zcash?
SecretNetwork is very different from something like Monero and Zcash. First of all, the secret token itself; its transactions are not private directly. So secret coin itself is a coin closer to Bitcoin and Ethereum in nature. However, there’s a mechanism like Zcash to turn any $SCRT that you have to secret$SCRT which is the privacy representation of $SCRT and can hide your identity, the amount of money that you have, and the amount you sent out. Also, Monero and Zcash work for transactions alone, they are non-programmable. Applications like poker stated earlier cannot be created on them but can be created on SecretNetwork.
What are other examples of applications that can be enhanced by privacy?
Honestly, countless applications can evolve through privacy, but the simplest one is private tokens.
1. For instance, secret tokens on SecretNetwork. Ethereum uses ERC20 while SecretNetwork uses SNI20. You can take any coin like Bitcoin or Ethereum and wrap it as SNIP20 to make them anonymous through the SecretNetwork bridge.
2. Also, gaming is becoming a real thing on the Blockchain but most actual games require imperfect information. Poker is a game of imperfect information where each player can only see some part of the information i.e I see my cards and you see your cards. In fact, all games require imperfect information and should be built on something like SecretNetwork.
3. Then let’s take a look at DAOs and governance. DAOs today are completely public and the voting system looks more like a dictatorship than a democracy because you can see what the biggest holders voted for, so you’ll see 95% of people voting yes or no at the same time. For DAOs to be sustainable and useful, we need something like a private voting system. A system where someone’s vote can not be influenced by other people’s votes because a voter cannot see the votes of others. There’s already the Cefi community on SecretNetwork that uses the private voting system and if you see their mode of governance, you’ll see it more like a democracy than other DAOs.
4. Secret NFTs; the biggest joke around NFTs today is the right-clicking save issue. If I own NFT you can actually go and right-click save it. So, in secret NFTs, the privacy mechanism can be used to program the nfts in such a way that the content is encrypted and only allows the owner to decrypt the associated data and see the content. And that’s a super exciting use case of SecretNetwork on NFTs as it makes NFTs more valuable and useful.
Is there any utility for the $SCRT token than being the gas token?
$SCRT is the gas token of SecretNetwork and also the governance token. It’s a layer one cosmos chain and there’s a sum amount of the coin set aside as a community pool for the community to vote on how to spend it. And there have been a lot of projects, and communities using $SCRT for their collaboration with SecretNetwork. In one or two months, there are going to be up to 5 or 10 projects that will airdrop their tokens to $SCRT stakers. That’s an implied and collaborative utility.
Why did SecretNetwork choose to build on the cosmos ecosystem?
SecretNetwork was Initially meant to be a layer2 token on Ethereum. But when we already saw it wasn’t working well or scaling well, we decided to move to layer1. Here it can only work as something that looks like a bad model or a waste of time. Then there were two options left, either Cosmos or Polkadot. First of all, the cosmos was live back then, Cosmos doesn’t require to use the basic Cosmos token i.e permissible to build a basic sovereign chain and other technical reasons led to choosing to build on the cosmos.
How do you reconcile privacy with principles like accountability and transparency?
The motivation behind the development of SecretNetwork is to show that accountability and transparency are not contradictory to privacy. SecretNetwork gives accountability and transparency when they’re needed and maintains privacy when they’re not. Blockchains are about accountability and correctness, not about transparency. They’re about making sure that no one is cheated, that data is safe, and can’t be tampered with. The only area where reconciliation might be needed is private messaging and private transaction. As said earlier, $SCRT itself is not a private coin but can be turned into a private token in the system. And once that is done, it hides it from anyone else. So in case of hacks or regulator issues, the viewing keys concept serves as a control to handle that. These viewing keys give read-only access of transactions to the user and he can share it with whom he wills. There’s also a tax service on SecretNetwork which allows users to export their transaction history and give it out for tax accounting and SecretNetwork is already utilizing this function as a company.
How do we encourage people to protect themselves more and start using platforms like SecretNetwork?
This is a great question and it’s something we do every day as a community. Privacy is not just a human right but something we need in many cases. Some applications can’t just survive without privacy. Voting is a good example because private voting is what we do in our society these days. We need privacy in the Blockchain because many things don’t function without it. People will be encouraged to care more about their privacy when we build better systems using privacy Blockchain technology and decentralized systems that incentivize people. People should also be educated on privacy.
What are the Secret plans for 2022?
First and foremost, we plan to have more people come building on SecretNetwork and it’s already happening. We’re doing a lot of infrastructure upgrades. We’re planning to have at least two upgrades this year. One of them is coming in April. Another thing we’re working on is IBCv2. Right now most chains or all chains use IBCv1 which connects all cosmos chains and to other chains outside the cosmos. For instance, you can move $UST, $TERRA, $LUNA or $ETH to $SCRT using IBCv1 function. As for IBCv2, it’s the ability to make a smart-contract call from one chain and interact with it on another chain. For example, DAOs that need a private voting system but are operating on a different chain can easily make a smart-contract call from their chain to SecretNetwork and use the secret private voting system with ease. In addition, we’re working on a platform called LEGENDAO. Legendao is a new kind of nft platform that connects Defi and gaming with NFTs. Brand name artists will be brought to the platform to make it more interesting. This is what we’re building right now and it’s going to launch within one to two months.
Where can people find SecretNetwork and learn more about it?
The official website of SecretNetwork is www.scrt.network . Our Twitter link and discord links are there to join the community. Also for anyone who wants to be more engaged meaningfully in SecretNetwork, there’s the secret agent program with over10 thousand people helping the network out.
If you’re a $SCRT holder, make sure to stake it because a lot of projects coming to us for collaboration and they’ll airdrop to $SCRT stakers.
Watch the podcast video here
