What can you use RAILGUN for?
What can you do with RAILGUN?
Within the RAILGUN smart contracts, users can:
Shield (deposit into a Private Balance) any fungible (i.e. ERC 20) tokens on Ethereum, Arbitrum, BSC, or Polygon.
Shield any non-fungible (i.e. ERC 721, ERC 1155) token.
Send and receive tokens to and from any other 0zk address without revealing sender and deposit address and token type and amount sent.
Anonymously send assets to a public 0x address from a 0zk address.
Anonymously interact with smart contracts
What are the benefits of Private Transactions?
Normally, everything you do on public blockchains is visible on block explorers and analysis tools like Etherscan forever. Whilst blockchains are pseudonymous, the fact that transaction information is visible in perpetuity means that getting doxed at a later date reveals your entire balance, history, and transaction habits. For example, notable wallets belonging to funds and well-known investors are labelled on services like Nansen, proving that you are not pseudonymous for long in the world of crypto.
This state of affairs is naturally limiting for certain business use cases. Thus, RAILGUN is aimed at this professional and institutional utility and also for ordinary crypto users who want a similar level of financial privacy as they would get from traditional banking.
Without financial privacy, the total addressable market of crypto will not grow beyond a niche minority. How many people would use credit cards if every time you bought your morning coffee you broadcast your financial situation to the whole world? How many people would choose to receive their salaries into a bank account that revealed exactly how much they were paid to every other bank account holder? These thought experiments highlight how privacy is essential for mainstream adoption of crypto which can only occur if protocols optimize for these use cases.
Potential use cases:
Alpha Protection: Traders who want to keep their alpha secret can trade feely and maintain their hard-fought informational advantages
Private Payroll: Payroll services for companies that pay in cryptocurrency. Using public blockchains in their current state for payroll reveals each employee’s exact salary
MEV Advantage: Builders of MEV searchers who do not wish to reveal the details of arbitrage opportunities they find
Censorship Resistance: Censorship resistant donations to causes by citizens who live in countries with unfriendly or corrupt governments officials
Anonymized Analytics: Counteracts services like Nansen or Etherscan, where notable wallets are labelled or known, meaning that some large investors are personally identifiable
Compliance: Financial companies remaining compliant with data protection laws such as GDPR
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