Mystiko Network: The Cross-Chain Privacy Benchmark

Mystiko Network is the zero-knowledge (ZK) technology layer of Web3, providing privacy protocols and ZK software development kits to ensure scalability

Recently I bought several 5x-raising projects in the secondary market, such as $hype and $blue. I bought higher and higher, which brought me huge profits.

Which brings me to the realization – copycat season may be here soon.

From the perspective of Altcoin Season, 67% of the top 50 tokens in the past 90 days outperformed Bitcoin. If the proportion reaches 75%, it means that the cryptocurrency market has officially entered the Altcoin Season.

Judging from the curve, the market conducted its first test from December 1st to 8th, and entered a stage of adjustment after falling back after December 9th. The market is currently accumulating strength and it is estimated that the adjustment will be completed soon, followed by the counterfeit explosion season.

At this time we should be adequately prepared: investigate in advance, ambush at a low point, and then wait for the wind to come.

Among altcoins, apart from Defi, the most popular among capital and big players is the privacy project. This track has been rising quietly, so much so that many people don’t even know the existence of this track. For example, Zcash has risen 56% in the past 30 days.

So today let’s talk about why we should pay attention to the privacy track.

This article is divided into the following aspects:

- Why does the privacy track exist?

- 10 privacy projects compared

- What are the innovations of Mystiko?

- What are the opportunities at Mystiko?

**1. Why does the privacy track exist?**

The transparency of blockchain is a double-edged sword. The transaction activities and balances of users on the chain are transparent. Although the real entities of the on-chain accounts are anonymous, the transaction data of their accounts is almost completely transparent. If your on-chain address happens to have interacted with a platform that requires KYC, such as CEX, then all your assets on the chain are exposed. Even if you use a DEX such as Uniswap, you will still be exposed.

Web3 is highly related to assets and the chain is highly transparent, which leads to a big problem. If people are interested, it is easy to track these transactions. A typical case is:

- 3AC once confidently disclosed some addresses to prove their super strength in the cryptocurrency circle;

- However, unfortunately, they encountered the LUNA incident. In the LUNA incident, some people tracked the 3AC address, and a large amount of reverse operations flowed in in an instant, which eventually accelerated the liquidation of 3AC.

In addition, there is the FTX incident. The FTX incident has exacerbated people’s distrust of CEX. In order to rebuild market confidence, CEX must disclose its assets more transparently than before, but many users and institutions do not want their account balances to be made public.

At this time, the market needs privacy projects, whether it is hiding addresses or hiding transactions, as long as they are not "naked" on the chain.

So when Monero and ZCash first came out, they were favored by VCs, miners, and big players. It was not until Tornado Cash was banned that people really realized that the market needed more privacy projects to provide services.

The current solution on the market is to use zk-SNARKs to improve the privacy of encrypted assets, storing the user's balance in a Merkle tree or KZG commitment, which not only protects the user's privacy but also effectively discloses the user's asset status. The encrypted assets that adopt this solution are called "privacy tokens". From 2013 to now, this type of privacy tokens include:

- Zcash (ZEC)

- Verge (XVG)

- Monero (XMR)

- Dash (DASH)

- Beam (BEAM)

- Horizen (ZEN)

- Bytecoin (BCN)

The cryptocurrency industry advocates investing in new projects rather than old ones. Finding new projects and projects that have not been hyped up can increase investors' chances of winning. Therefore, this article will no longer analyze those old privacy projects. Here we have found 10 representative projects for comparison.

**2. Comparison of ten privacy projects**

Privacy projects are mainly created to meet the needs of users who value anonymity, and are generally used to protect data, addresses, transaction records, amounts or files, etc. The concept of privacy was first introduced by Monero. In the 10 years since the launch of $xmr, the token has risen by 8601%, creating huge wealth for countless miners.

Inspired by Monero, developers have tried various methods to develop privacy coins in the past 10 years. The most famous one is Zcash, which uses ZKP technology to hide transaction addresses