Zano Bi-weekly Report (3rd August 2021)

Welcome all! Time for another quick rundown of what the “Shadowy Super-Coders” of Zano project have been busy building on our unstoppable climb to digital cash privacy nirvana.

Wrapped Zano (wZANO)

We’ve now entered the testing phase for wrapped Zano, with a mess of wZano currently bouncing around the Ethereum Rinkeby testnet as we try our best to break something. Wrapping has been made as simple as possible and is triggered automatically in the Zano client when a send transaction is made to an Ethereum destination address. Unwrapping is done via a web interface. Full details and slick graphics upon release, but for now here’s a shot of a very small amount of wZano in MetaMask.

The restore-db-from-metadata system (mentioned in the last update) has also been tested and is working fine.

Logo/Branding Explorations

We’ve been exploring potential new logos for Zano which has led to some deep, philosophical discussions on brand identity and what constitutes a great, or terrible, logo. It’s still early days — I mention it more as an example of how deeply the founders care about the project. It should be reassuring to anyone who holds Zano that even something as seemingly simple as the logo is given serious thought.

Proof-of-Stake with Hidden Values

Val has made great progress with his RingCT compatible Proof-of-Stake scheme. While earlier iterations used zero mixins (or “decoys”) in the staking transaction, this was later amended, with mixins included at a cost of 700 bytes each — a small increase in transaction size, but obviously preferable from a privacy perspective. This has since been reduced to 128 bytes per mixin — a huge saving — by using aggregated Bulletproofs.

Aside from this, he has also created a PoC implementation of the scheme in C++, which so far is working as expected, and has published the first draft of a technical paper describing the scheme titled “A Proof-of-Stake scheme for confidential transactions with hidden amounts”: https://github.com/hyle-team/docs/blob/master/PoS/

Feedback, questions and critiques from cryptographers/mathematicians are especially welcome!

It’s easy to understate the importance of this achievement — with very little fanfare he has potentially solved a genuinely difficult problem, one that many people didn’t believe could be solved. Without this, it wouldn’t have been possible to match or exceed the levels of privacy offered by certain other CryptoNote-derived projects while maintaining Zano’s hybrid PoW/PoS consensus scheme. In other words, privacy-parity with CryptoNote’s finest is only possible due to this breakthrough, so hats off to Valeriy on the achievement, we’re very lucky to have him!

Community (“Zano Amplify”)

In an effort to take our message of digital cash self-sovereignty to a wider audience, a Telegram bot is being built that will reward users for retweeting selected Zano-related tweets. So far user registration, twitter account validation and a fair bit of abuse protection has been done. Still to go: retweet detection and deciding on a reward scheme and distribution. More details as work progresses.

Thus concludes the latest biweekly progress report. We’d love to hear your thoughts and opinions in the Zano Discord/Telegram/Reddit groups. Till next time!