by Koh Wei Jie · 8 min read

Railway semaphore signals. Source: WikiMedia Commons

This year, Ethereum has undergone a privacy renaissance of sorts. Encouraged by prominent members of the community, researchers, programmers, and DAO funders have collaborated to accelerate the ideation and implementation of privacy solutions, particularly those which employ zero-knowledge proofs. We are now at a stage where a key privacy building block is emerging from research and entering production: Semaphore, a means for anonymous signalling.

Semaphore is the basis of an ETH and ERC20 token mixer named MicroMix. In the near future, it can be used for other privacy-enhancing applications such as anonymous login, anonymous DAOs, anonymous voting, and journalism.

This technical blog post will explain how Semaphore and MicroMix work, and how Semaphore enables MicroMix to provide users with transaction privacy in a noncustodial manner. It will also describe its performance and tradeoffs, and finally outline how Semaphore can enable other zero-knowledge applications which would be otherwise impractical.

Readers should understand how Ethereum smart contracts work and some basic cryptography, but do not need to be familiar with zero-knowledge proofs. Weiterlesen