Ripple: Is XRP becoming a privacy coin? Anonymity on XRPL researched

• Professor Stefanie Roos is driving the research of anonymity features on the XRP Ledger.
• Their research is funded by Ripple’s initiative UBRI and offers students direct access to the company’s expertise.

Anonymity and data protection are important factors that are becoming increasingly important to the population and companies of today. The Twitter hack has shown how vulnerable centralized systems are. Ripple has also recognized this trend and is driving research into anonymity features on the XRP Ledger.

Data protection and privacy increasingly important, also at Ripple

In a post on the Ripple Blog, Stefanie Roos, assistant professor at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, says that people think Bitcoin provides sufficient anonymity, but the reality is very different:

Because you don’t have to enter your real name, people believe that Bitcoin is very privacy preserving. But when someone keeps reusing the same information, it’s possible to track everything they do. If you can link that profile to a real person then you can see all their activity.

Roos had recently developed a peer-to-peer system called SpeedyMurmurs at the Canadian University of Waterloo, which uses a path-based transaction approach similar to the Bitcoin Lightning network. Roos is now researching the programming of a flexible anonymity for blockchain-based payments, especially in the area of corporate transactions.

Data protection is becoming more and more important in today’s world, as companies do not want to disclose sensitive data when they pay via the blockchain. In their opinion, private blockchains are only a limited future-proof solution because only a limited number of actors can use the system. Public blockchains with sufficiently secure anonymity functions represent the future in their opinion:

Think of systems where anonymity is temporal. You get privacy for the time that you need it. If you want to have transparency later on, you can reveal the relevant cryptographic keys to demonstrate that you complied with regulatory requirements, show off your high-quality suppliers or to prove a patent case.

Roos herself and some of her students are engaged in in-depth research into anonymity on the XRP Ledger through the Blockchain Research Initiative (UBRI). The research team is working on the implementation of temporary anonymity on the XRP Ledger as well as on the elimination of currently existing security holes for blockchain models in complicated large-scale projects.

In addition to financial support from UBRI, students will be able to contact Ripple staff to gain valuable expertise in the blockchain industry. Ripple has long been supporting the training of tomorrow’s specialists and is thus decisively driving forward the adaptation.

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