We really appreciate all of our community members’ support on Dolphin Testnet v1. We received a large amount of constructive feedback, and have used that feedback to improve our product. So far, through our feedback form, we have received over 430 responses to help us understand how we can integrate new features and performance boosts to introduce a strong second version of our product.
Recap on v1
To recap, since Dolphin V1 (boto) launched, it has processed over 33K transactions across 2,300 unique wallet addresses.
Among those transactions, there are approximately 7,800 mint transactions, and 3,741 private transfers and reclaim transactions. The amount of interaction from various users interested and curious about what we are building to enable privacy in web3 demonstrates the potential of what our project can become.
Launch of v2
The next chapter is Dolphin Testnet v2, which brings significant improvements.
Reusable Shielded Addresses for Improved UX
Testnet V1 used one-time addresses, which were unique to every transaction, derived from your long-term secret key. This one-time address was then used by a sender to build the UTXO and NOTE that you could spend later.
Testnet V2 uses a reusable shielded address system, which offers the same experience as regular private-public keypairs (such as those you use for your DOT wallet addresses). Shielded addresses can be used indefinitely, or once as an optional feature.
Viewing Keys for Self-Sovereign Compliance
While the front-end functionality for viewing keys will be introduced later on in the v2 testnet, we have implemented it on the protocol level.
Viewing keys represent one of the first steps that Mantamari is taking towards self-sovereign compliance and auditing. The viewing keys are constructed in such a way that they add no cost to the core payment protocol itself.
Viewing keys let users decrypt and deanonymize all the private transactions sent from a particular public key. Viewing keys are read-only, so they do not give viewers any power to spend private assets.
Optimized ZK Membership Proofs for Faster Performance
Our in house cryptography team has improved both the protocol design and underlying zero-knowledge proof cryptographic primitives such as commitment schemes and hash functions (we will introduce these improvements in detailed articles later). As a result, the time your computer uses to generate zero-knowledge proof is improved by 5–10x, you can enjoy a much sleek user interface now!
Merkle-Tree-based membership proofs are the most expensive part of our private payment circuit. These proofs are chained calls to a fixed binary hash function, so we need to optimize this function as much as possible.
For these membership proofs, we also need a uniform data type across each layer of the tree. Field elements are the cheapest data type to operate over, so we needed to find a fast hash that operates only on-field elements.
We chose the Poseidon Hash Function to optimize this most expensive part of the circuit. Poseidon is a very simple repeated-round-based hash function. It is based entirely on algebraic operations on-field elements and so is the most zk-friendly hash function out there for current state-of-the-art proving systems.
The ZK-proof systems are more optimized for these algebraic constructions in the found fields. Poseidon is exactly what you want in this environment to reduce the number of constraints.
Participate in the Migration
We would like to let the Dolphin Testnet V1 user transfer their balances into V2 for the sake of convenience (instead of using the testnet faucet). To do this, we will be taking a snapshot of the balances within our network.
To participate in the snapshot and retain your balance, you must unwrap your private tokens back into public testnet tokens. Without doing this, we cannot take a snapshot, since private balances cannot be viewed by anyone including the Manta Network core contributors. If you would like to participate in this snapshot, please unwrap your private tokens before March 27, 2022 at 0:00 UTC.
If you have any issue on converting your private tokens to public, please go to the Manta Network Discord Channel to ask for help from your peers and the core team.
About Manta Network
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Manta Network is committed to building a better Web3 world through privacy protection. Manta’s product design starts from first principles and provides end-to-end privacy protection for blockchain users through leading cryptography architectures such as zkSNARK. While ensuring privacy, Manta offers interoperability, convenience, high performance, and auditability, allowing users to conduct private transfers and transactions between any parallel chain of assets. Manta’s vision is to provide more convenient privacy protection services for the entire blockchain world.
Manta’s founding team is made up of several cryptocurrency veterans, professors and academics with experience from Harvard University, MIT and Algorand. Manta’s advisors include Hypersphere Ventures co-founder Jack Platts, Polychain partner Tekin Salimi, former Web3 Foundation co-founder Ashley Tyson, Consensys’ Shuyao Kong.
Manta’s investors include Polychain, ParaFi, Binance Labs, Multicoin, CoinFund, Alameda, DeFiance and Hypersphere. Manta is also an official Web3 Foundation grant recipient, a member of Substrate Builder Program, and a member of Berkeley Blockchain Accelerator.
Dolphin Testnet V1 to V2 Migration was originally published in Manta Network on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
