Thread by @jcliff42

I just finished a deep dive into Zether, a novel cryptocurrency protocol from researchers at Stanford and Visa. I am blown away with the work they have done. crypto.stanford.edu/~buenz/papers/… /1

Zether is a new protocol, not a new asset. It is consensus agnostic and can work on any account based cryptoasset network such as Ethereum or Stellar. 2/

On Ethereum, concealed ether become zether (ZTH) via a smart contract called the ZSC and has five public functions:

Fund - create zth by depositing eth
Burn - get eth back
Transfer - transfer zth
Lock- lock zth to a smart contract
Unlock - unlock zth from a smart contract 3/

Zether uses homomorphic encryption which allows values to be encrypted, yet specific math is still available. It does so with Pedersen commitments similar to Confidential Transactions currently found in Bitcoin’s Elements or in Monero. 4/

When values are encrypted, it’s important to make sure they conform to specified range. Typically we are ensuring values are non-negative. This is where range proofs come in, and bulletproofs are the state of the art here. 5/

The Zether team not only improved the bulletproof design for range proofs with a new proposal called Σ-Bullets, they also provided implementations on Ethereum as part of developing this. Super badass! 6/

If academic research is a leading indicator for where the technology is going in the future, we are in very good shape. 7/