October 8th 2020
IOC Development Update
Due to the current push by governments to further break anon chains, it was imperative the team address these issues with our community. After carefully reviewing current stances, in order to afford our users complete private transactions with IOC, the team assessed that this would require a new chain implying a full reset back to a genesis block embedding mandatory privacy. For these reasons the Zero Knowledge protocol part of the upgrade is on hold. It is our duty to always advise best practices to protect the project and its users.
Recent action from governments against other privacy projects include:
- Monero — organizations being paid to crack and track balances See here
- Mimblewimble Not ready for Litecoin, currently in testnet slated for 2021 if miners adopt
- Travel Rule: establishment efforts to apply it to our sector & counter efforts to propose a ZK crypto-based solution instead.
- BitMEX — Implications of Money laundering, failure to KYC/AML and infringing OFAC guidelines
Unfortunately simply ‘turning on’ anon features even by encrypting balances, will not ‘hide’ the full transaction history (Monero comparison and what we’re seeing today as mentioned above). The fix for this would be to create a completely new ledger for Nighthawk. Unfortunately this is complicated for users and requires a swap of ‘Original IOC’ to ‘Nighthawk IOC’. The swap is not complicated for the team but it would require a decentralized exchange to do a full swap. This would be the right way to go full anon in order to ensure complete transaction anonymity. This solution can certainly be revisited depending how the regulatory environment continues and changes to cryptocurrency laws over the next months and years.
*If we were to still proceed under current conditions with Nighthawk, it would offer some privacy protections from the enabled block forward but without starting a new “sidechain” or “IOC Chain Reset” it would not be possible to offer full anonymity and prior Nighthawk transactions could be traced. Code work on Zero Knowledge is intact and we would not lose it. We can at any time go back to it again and if proper solutions are worked out in the future.*
This is our proposal for the community
Our proposal going forward for IOC would be to keep the original chain going and activate the current mostly ready upgrades of the Nighthawk protocol which would be:
- Stake halving
- Blockchain pruning tool for orphans
- Cold Sig (offline signatures)
These upgrades would be activated at a certain block in late November and wouldn’t require a swap or complicated wallet updates.
As part of the proposal, with now proven POS security, we would follow this upgrade by enabling Smart Contracts on IOC. Smart Contracts would thrust IOC to move in parallel to current market conditions by allowing developers to deploy DeFi/Tokens while including NFTs to be leveraged in a wide spectrum of cases like gaming and Intellectual Property/Copyright. Fees for deploying smart contracts will be rerouted back to stakers. By enabling smart contracts, IOC would be primed to serve as a launching platform for the future Chameleon project alongside DIOEX, which would serve as a decentralized exchange swap “bridge” for both projects. We hope that this will clarify current conditions and we look forward to our community discussions.
Thank You all / IOC Dev Team
