To be honest, it was only a matter of time before this happened and now it appears that Secret Network is the first one to have integrated the characteristics of privacy coins into ERC-20 tokens. An open-source blockchain protocol, Secret Network has offered its users an option of integrating privacy features into the Ethereum blockchain itself, as well as 14 ERC-20 tokens. According to the protocol’s blog post, they have recently launched their Secret Ethereum Bridge on the mainnet. This gives the opportunity to all ETH and ERC-20 token holders to create new programmable versions of the assets they hold and to be able to do that with privacy features.
As a matter of fact, Secret Network actually ended up as claiming that these secret tokens would appear to be quite similar to a popular privacy-focused coin, Monero. In the blog post, Secret Network mentioned that its tokens would have the same privacy as that provided by Monero and Zcash, along with the programmability that’s a key feature of all ERC-20 tokens. According to the aforementioned blog post, the only people who will be able to actually see the Secret Token contracts will be those who own the contract themselves and the holders who have a viewing key on the network.
As far as everyone else is concerned, these interactions will appear to be fully encrypted, which means the contracts will not be visible. As of now, the blockchain protocol announced that these privacy features are only being integrated with 14 ERC-20 tokens. These tokens include USDT, WBTC, MKR, KNC, SNX, COMP, LINK, UNI, BAND, ETH, YFI, AAVE, TUSD, and OCEAN. This announcement by Secret Network brings the blockchain protocol closer to achieving its plan. After all, the protocol’s aim is to add these privacy features to public blockchains as well.
Developers will be able to deploy and develop the ‘secret’ smart contracts of the Secret Network by making use of encrypted inputs, outputs, and states. It is reported that a blockchain will be able to use these contracts for making use of the private data of decentralized apps and they will not compromise the personal and sensitive data of the users in any way. Moreover, the protocol also clarified that they have plans of launching a bridge mining reward system. They are planning to launch this system in January of next year, and users will be able to earn SCRT tokens if they decide to lock their assets in the Secret Ethereum Bridge.
It is obvious that Secret has chosen to enter the privacy arena and they have opted to use a rather unconventional means of doing so. Therefore, it will certainly be interesting to see how it turns out. It is already apparent that the world’s governments are not very fond of privacy coins because of their prolific use in criminal activities. Monero is an excellent example, as it has been used in mining botnets for illegally mining the coin through user PCs due to which governments are trying to crack its code.
