Phantom: An Efficient Privacy Protocol Using zk-SNARKs Based on Smart Contracts

Xing Li; Yi Zheng; Kunxian Xia; Tongcheng Sun; John Beyler

Paper 2020/156 Original: eprint.iacr.org/2020/156 ↗

Phantom: An Efficient Privacy Protocol Using zk-SNARKs Based on Smart Contracts

Xing Li

Yi Zheng

Kunxian Xia

Tongcheng Sun

John Beyler

Abstract

Privacy is a critical issue for blockchains and decentralized applications. Currently, there are several blockchains featured for privacy. For example, Zcash uses zk-SNARKs to hide the transaction data, where addresses and amounts are not visible to the public. The zk-SNARK technology is secure and has been running stably in Zcash for several years. However, it cannot support smart contracts, which means people are not able to build decentralized applications on Zcash. To solve this problem, two protocols, Quorum ZSL and Nightfall, have tried to implement zk-SNARKs through smart contracts. In this way, decentralized applications with privacy features are enabled by these protocols on the blockchain. However, experiments on the Ethereum Virtual Machine show that these protocols cost a lot of time and gas for running, meaning they are not suitable for everyday use. In this paper, we propose an efficient privacy protocol using zk-SNARKs based on smart contracts. It helps to make several decentralized applications, like digital assets, stable coins, and payments, confidential. The protocol balances the trade-off between the gas cost of smart contracts and the computational complexity of zk-SNARK proof generation. Moreover, it uses the In-band Secret Distribution to store private information on the blockchain. The gas cost for a confidential transaction is only about 1M, and the transaction generation takes less than 6 seconds on a regular computer.

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Category: Cryptographic protocols
Publication info: Preprint.
History: 2020-02-16: last updated; 2020-02-13: published
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2020/156
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2020/156,
      author = {Xing Li and Yi Zheng and Kunxian Xia and Tongcheng Sun and John Beyler},
      title = {Phantom: An Efficient Privacy Protocol Using zk-SNARKs Based on Smart Contracts},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2020/156},
      year = {2020},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/156}
}