The Blank wallet is an Ethereum–based, non-custodial browser wallet that is focusing on providing a high level of privacy and anonymity to crypto users. The project aims to introduce a concept of ERC-20 pooling via smart contracts that will help in hiding user information and transactions.
User privacy is one of the more important concerns of the blockchain industry today. One can easily track down all your incoming and outgoing transaction history details using a block explorer like etherscan if they got access to your wallet address. Many platforms are working towards introducing the privacy factor, but unfortunately, complete privacy or anonymity is still a far goal to achieve.
Blank claims to offer the utmost user privacy or anonymity and is working on adding some extra features to the existing privacy solution. It uses a smart contract that will hide the amount and the source wallet details. It uses the existing infrastructure by Tornado Cash that supports a pool of 0.1, 1, 10, and 100 ETH smart contracts as a core component to provide wallet privacy.
Following this, Blank will also add user financial data in a pool of funds called an anonymity set that protects the exact outgoing transaction of a user from getting disclosed. The more transactions in the anonymity set, the greater the privacy.
For withdrawal, a new wallet address will be created by Blank whenever a user makes a withdrawal request, and it will contain the desired amount requested by the user. Now the catch here is, instead of a source wallet address as normally happens in the case of a general crypto transaction, here the transaction will be sourced from the pooled smart contract that holds everyone’s funds.
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How Does It Work?
The Blank Wallet V1 functionality is majorly based on Tornado Cash private transactions. It uses a smart contract that will allow all incoming Ether or tokens to be deposited in a non-custodial manner protected by strong cryptography.
Deposit
To deposit, the user first generates a transaction secret and then sends the Pedersen Hash of a nullifier, the secret, and the funds to the smart contract. This process is called commitment and is registered in the contract.
A hash function is a one-way function that means one can easily derive the hash from a secret, but it is nearly impossible to derive the secret from a given hash. This method ensures that a user is entitled to withdraw a certain amount of funds from the contract only when he/she confirms the possession of a particular secret of a commitment.
Withdraw
Once the user confirms the possession of a particular secret of a commitment, they can proceed with withdrawing their funds. For withdrawal, zk-Snark technology is used.
zk-Snark technology is a process by which users can verify that they have made a deposit to the deposit smart contract and hold a secret from the list of unspent commitments without mentioning their exact deposit corresponds to a secret. Thus, the withdrawal address cannot be directly linked to the deposit address.
The Anonymity Set contains the list of deposit transactions that are waiting for a withdrawal for a particular denomination. It is directly linked to the privacy quotient. The higher the number of transactions in the anonymity set, the greater the privacy.
The internal procedure mentioned above will be taken care of by the Blank application. It provides easy and seamless integration of the anonymity pool to the newly created browser extension wallet. Blank users are not required to write down the secret phrases or manually create several wallets.
Also, to provide additional security against tracking user activities on both on-chain and off-chain media, the Blank platform has integrated with the Tor network. The Tor network will be used for sending transactions to the node providers or interacting with dApps, ensuring complete user anonymity.
Advantages
- Mask your wealth – Only the funds owner has the right to access, see, and manage funds. All individual funds are grouped together in a pooled smart contract that practically gives no access to anyone who can check the details of your assets.
- Hide origins of your wealth – Blank will provide you the flexibility to hide/unhide the origin of your funds.
- Invisible trading activity – No KYC needed. To ensure a high level of privacy, whenever users opt for a withdrawal or trade request, Blank will create a new wallet, which means no past history.
How Security Is Achieved in Blank Wallet
Privacy and security go hand in hand. One cannot achieve full security if there is any compromise in the privacy terms and conditions. Thus, to achieve a privacy-focused wallet, the platform has decided to maintain high-security standards.
Blank will store all sensitive and key wallet information like encrypted seed phrases, addresses, keys, and account data, along with Tornado secrets, in the browser’s local storage, and it is completely isolated from any external website, network, or application. The wallet owner has full control over his data and asset.
The key input details of zk-Snarks can be extracted from the wallet’s seed phrase, and thus, users need to mandatorily save the seed phrase, including zk-Snark secrets, so that they can import wallet data in the future if required.
BLANK Token
BLANK is the native token of the platform. It plays an important role in the Blank ecosystem and has the following important utilities:
- Fee Relaxation for Token Holders – Blank wallet users are entitled to pay a service charge for using the platform’s privacy features. However, the platform is offering relaxation on service charges for BLANK token holders. The token holders are categorized into several tiers depending upon the number of tokens a person is holding. The various tiers and the relaxation on service charges are as follows:
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- 1,000 BLANK tokens – 10% fee reduction
- 5,000 BLANK tokens – 15% fee reduction
- 10,000 BLANK tokens – 25% fee reduction
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- Token Burn From 50% of the Fees – The Blank project has decided that the 50% of the fees collected from the Blank wallet’s smart contracts will be utilized to buy the BLANK tokens back from the market and later burning them, which will result in the reduction of the overall circulating token supply.
- Liquidity Providers Earn 50% of the Fees – The project will reward users for maintaining the liquidity in Uniswap for the ETH/BLANK pair. Blank aims to proportionally distribute half of the fees to the liquidity provider.
- Referral and Reward Systems Use Only BLANK Tokens – To enhance the outreach of the BLANK token, the platform has decided to distribute the referral reward as well as airdrops in the platform’s native token.
- Exclusive Features and “Access-First” Functionality to Token Holders – The platform has restricted some of the wallet’s features only to BLANK token holders. Elite users will get exclusive access to participate in an early testing environment (such as alpha or beta testing of the wallet) through a special invitation.
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Conclusion
Blank is a privacy-centered wallet. It aims to provide privacy and anonymity to user funds and transactions. The wallet is offering to provide ownership of funds only to the designated user. No one apart from the owner can access or check the source of funds or transaction details. It is working on the top of the current existing solution by various privacy-focused projects like Tornado Cash and adopted its core infrastructure strategy to build a pool of smart contracts for four different ETH denominations (.1, 1, 10, and 100). The wallet is not yet live. The exact features and the claimed privacy could be tested when the wallet will be launched for users.
Resources: Blank whitepaper
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