The Strength of Horses and the Heart of People

When NIL ascends to the sky, XMR will be delisted.

Shang Yang knows the strength of horses, and Bigan knows the heart of people. When NIL ascends to the sky, XMR will be delisted.

Blockchain originated from privacy technology, especially cryptography. From elliptic curves to zero-knowledge proofs, all of them prove the success of privacy economics in the Web 3.0 era.

But things are not perfect. From XMR being frequently delisted from CEX/DEX to the arrest of the founder of Tornado Cash, you will find that even if Nillion can be listed on Binance, the geek spirit of privacy projects is retreating, and its final product delivery capabilities are far from perfect.

When it comes to polishing privacy products, blockchain projects of the same type need to learn from their Web2 counterparts and improve their own posture.

Proton proves that privacy can be a well-functioning product

Privacy is a Feature, Not a Product.

Simply talking about privacy to strengthen the product form is meaningless. In other words, privacy also requires PMF. The reason why giants such as Google and Meta can violate privacy while making people unable to stop is because of convenience and network effects. They can be used out of the box and everyone uses them. Even individuals have to use them in office scenarios, so they will eventually accept everything from Google.

On this point, the regulatory authorities' model of using fines to replace regulation has failed miserably. Even taking the legendary penalty-resistant Google's $2.974 billion as an example, Google would only need about 16 more days to earn it back, and these fines cannot be converted into revenue for European technology companies, leading to their further powerlessness in the face of Google.

Faced with this problem, Proton's approach is to build its own full range of products, starting from CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research). The pure inherent credibility of scientific researchers is higher than that of commercial companies. Cryptography technology, open source code, and product audits are used to build privacy products that are truly meaningful - you can achieve the corresponding functions without using Google's full range of products.

Of course, the current network effects and scale effects are still unable to compete with the giants, but compared with their blockchain peers, the products they provide are sufficient for daily use and are qualified Google Alternatives.

Compared with the entire Google Workspace family, the current Proton is basically a counterpart to Proton Mail itself. It is worth mentioning that Proton Mail is also the favorite of Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter and Square.

Proton Mail is different from general email products. It can be used without binding a mobile phone number, and supports end-to-end encryption mode to ensure the privacy transmission of emails. Before Telegram is regulated, it can be used in conjunction with TG's end-to-end mode to basically build a relatively high level of commercial privacy experience.

Of course, after the fall of Telegram, Proton Mail combined with Signal can also meet the privacy surfing needs of most people.

Similar to Telegram, Proton has also begun to enter the Web3 field. Its first product is Proton Wallet. Unlike transaction-oriented products such as Bitget Wallet and Binance Wallet, Proton Wallet is extremely restrained and has relatively simple functions.

The significance of Proton is to prove the feasibility of building products based on privacy technology. Different from the advertising profit model of traditional giants, Proton adopts a payment system. Different from the token economics system of Web3 peers, Proton has not reached the stage of issuing coins. We can call it:

The non-tokenization practice of crypto technology.

From Skiff to Nillion, the Tokenization of Crypto Technology

If Pronton is considered to be Don Quixote, then Skiff, Nym, Privasea to Nillion are dwarfs, whose own PMF has not been found yet, but the token (Snow White) has already taken the lead.

On February 9, 2024, Notion announced the acquisition of Skiff. This is also the first case of a large Web2 product acquiring a Web3 startup. It did not take the coin issuance route to create a new trend in the industry. By the way, this is actually the second time Stripe has acquired Bridge.

Skiff is also similar to the Google Suite, with a document suite based on IPFS and an encrypted mailbox service. However, there is a huge problem: the UI is extremely ugly and there is no experience in using it. This is also the biggest problem with current Web3 products. Limited by the slowness and high cost of the underlying blockchain, it is difficult to develop large products based on it to beat Web2 counterparts.

Proton is a suitable Google Alternative, but Skiff is not a qualified Proton Alternative.

In addition, the development of other Web3 privacy products is also not satisfactory. Nym gradually shifted its focus to the VPN field in the later period. Privasea in the FHE direction emphasized more on adaptation in