NIX — The First PoS Privacy Coin to Adopt Sigma

Mute.io
3 min readMay 6, 2019

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We explain why NIX is integrating Sigma into its Ghost Protocol and how this increases our privacy set, usability, scaling capabilities, and user security.

NIX is the first PoS currency to adopt Sigma

Dear NIX community,

We are thrilled to announce that NIX will be the first Proof-Of-Stake cryptocurrency to implement Sigma, a new highly scalable zero-knowledge privacy protocol. This continues the trend of rapid and successful development at NIX Platform, including the recently launched Off-Chain Governance beta.

Sigma allows us to significantly scale our privacy transactions by decreasing the on-chain size by 94%, as well as remove the trusted set-up previously needed with Zerocoin. This makes privacy on NIX much more scalable while even increasing the anonymity set NIX has to offer.

Sigma spends are 16.5x smaller than Zerocoin and only 6x larger than public transactions

Sigma has now been adopted into the NIX codebase as a Ghost Protocol addition, and several significant changes have been made in regard to NIX’s existing privacy functionalities:

  1. NIX’s 2-Way-Ghosting technology that utilizes Commitment Key Packs has been adapted to adhere to the Sigma protocol. This allows for the continuation of the ability to send mints without spending into public coins while keeping both sender and receiver anonymous. Furthermore, with Sigma, we have significantly reduced the length of CKPs by 73% which in itself is an amazing achievement.
  2. Deterministic CKP developments that no longer require the need for multiple address recreation. One short simple key can be used for CKP payments.
  3. Deterministic Ghost Vault wallet which allows coin backups and recovery through a single seed phrase.
  4. Previous denomination sets are now changed to include a sub-coin amount to allow for a fee model for the NIX commitment-key-pack payment scheme. As well, three denominations have been removed from the previous implementation which will now allow for a larger privacy set and thus higher anonymity. Commitment Key Pack transactions (2-way-ghosting) now rely on a dynamic fee placed module which will utilize the sub-coin denomination to match the fee system built in the Ghost Protocol.
Sigma CKP’s are 27% the size of older Zerocoin CKP’s

Code has been merged into NIX’s public repositories, and a public test-net will be launched soon. We invite everyone to join us and test alongside our developers.

Massive credits to the ZCoin development team for creating the first Sigma cryptographic codebase implementation and their developments on these grounds.

For more information about NIX, join our community!

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Mute.io
Mute.io

Written by Mute.io

Mute is a #zkRollup based DEX, farming platform, and Bond platform. Built on Ethereum and zkSync. https://mute.io

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