KEPLER - Confidential Assets Blockchain

What is Kepler
Kepler is the first implementation of the MimbleWimble-based CA project. Things that make Kepler special include:

Confidential Assets
Unlike other blockchain privacy platforms where only the transaction amount is hidden but not the asset type, Kepler is capable of hiding both. Confidential Assets is an entirely new way of conducting private transactions as now not only will the amounts be hidden but the asset type will be invisible as well. Researchers at Blockstream proposed analysing a technology called Confidential Assets back in 2017 which would be able to hide both amount and asset types.

Confidential Assets can be split into two different categories:

Native Blockchain Confidential Assets (native CA)
This is the first CA feature that will go live in Kepler in an upcoming release. Blockstream first debuted this feature in the Elements Blockchain platform in 2017 by Blockstream, this solution was based on Bitcoin and although the amount and asset types are hidden by blockchain viewers, the addresses of senders and receivers can still be seen by others. Kepler's CA feature will completely hide: Amount, asset types and of course, there's no addresses involved!

Since the birth of Bitcoin, native CT technologies have been continuously improved, from early CoinJoin and Ring signature to zk-SNARK and MimbleWimble. Among the above technologies, MimbleWimble is simple, easy to use and efficient, it combines privacy protection and capacity
scalability.

With the launch of Beam and Grin based on MimbleWimble protocol in January 2019, MimbleWimble has become a research hotspot. MimbleWimble contains two important concepts: Confidential Transactions and Cut-Through. Confidential transactions adopt Pedersen Commitment to hide the address and amount of transactions, and cut-through breaks the
correspondence between the inputs and outputs of transactions, further confusing the relationship between the transaction participants.

Smart Contracts Confidential Assets (contract CA)
Contract CA, also known as Confidential Smart Contracts are being developed for Kepler, these will incorporate Confidential Assets capabilities into Smart Contracts. One of the first use cases for this will be Confidential Assets Stablecoins.

Contract CT solutions include AZTEC, Nightfall, Zether, Anonymous Zether, PGC, etc. These implement native CT solutions (such as zk-SNARK,MimbleWimble) in smart contracts. A common problem with these contractCT schemes is the high gas cost, which of some schemes is even close to the total gas limit of the Ethereum block (about 8M).

If the problem of high gas cost is not solved, contract CT schemes are difficult to apply in practice. To this end, the Ethereum community proposed EIP-1109, proposing to reduce the gas of all precompiled contracts. However, the EIP needs to be applied to Ethereum through a hard fork, which may not be realized in a short time.

At present, many blockchain projects such as Monero, Zcash, Sero, Beam and Grin, have been able to implement native CT schemes. There are some issues with their design, which means that only thetransaction amount can be hidden while the asset type cannot be hidden. For instance, one user conducts a confidential transaction on Grin, the network participants do not know the transaction amount, but can undoubtedly determine that Grin coins are being sent.

In reality, users usually have multiple asset types (such as different kinds of cryptocurrency, securities or other assets). In the transaction process, users also do not want to expose the asset type in addition to the transaction amount. To be better applied in practice, blockchain privacy technologies must address that user requirement. Therefore, researchers at Blockstream proposed to study a technology called Confidential Assets that can hide both transaction amount and asset types.

Confidential Transactions
A few years ago, Bitcoin was considered to be anonymous. However, it has been found that
the association between Bitcoin addresses and real users may be revealed through multiple
channels, such as exchanges, offline payments, OTC transactions and some individuals or
organizations that conduct data mining. Today, Bitcoin is more widely considered to be
pseudonymous.

Kepler is natively capable of executing Confidential Transactions. This concept isn't really new as there are other platforms who have been executing Confidential Transactions for years.

However, MimbleWimble technology took Confidential transactions to another level Kepler Privacy Platform Kepler is the first implementation of the MimbleWimble-based Confidential Assets project.

Kepler is a blockchain platform capable of scalability, fungibility, privacy and security. No restrictions, no censorship, no middlemen. Kepler inherits Grin's amazing MimbleWimble technology and takes it a step further with the implementation of Confidential Assets (CA) POW Mining Kepler is and will be produced only through mining, no ICO, no staking. Only Proof of Work production.

Similar to Bitcoin, the on-chain data of the majority of public blockchains is open. Privacy
protection has recently gained more importance in the blockchain industry, and researchers
are constantly exploring privacy protection solutions. At present, privacy protection
solutions can be divided into two categories: one is the confidential transactions native on
the blockchain (hereinafter referred to as the native CT); the other is the confidential
transactions implemented by smart contracts (hereinafter referred to as the contract CT).

Here are some of the amazing native features in this technology :

No addresses
Transactions are sent in exported files which need to be confirmed (finalized) by the receiving party
Transactions can be sent via HTTPS
Transaction IDs will show on the block explorer but there is no connection for either one of the parties, TX id are only useful for both parties involved.

MINNING KEPLER
Kepler is a Proof-of-Work Blockchain focused on confidential assets and private transactions. Savvy Blockchain enthusiasts typically try to mine a project before they have released major components, because the difficulty is low and they don’t have to compete with as many people. In this guide, we’ll cover how to mine Kepler even if you do not own a powerful graphics card or ASIC.

Mining Kepler is quite similar to mining other POW cryptocurrencies, you need a Miner and a Pool (technically you can also solo-mine which can make sense if you have enough hashrate to do it).

Native CA
Blockstream released the CA feature in its Elements blockchain platform in 2017. Elements' CA solution is based on Bitcoin system, and although the amount and asset type cannot be seen by blockchain viewers, the addresses of senders and receivers can still be seen.

In June 2019, Beam announced that it would extend the roadmap -- adding support for CA feature. Beam planned to work in two directions:

Bridges to Bitcoin, Ethereum and eventually other blockchains: allow locking assets on Bitcoin or other blockchains and issuing matching bAssets on Beam;
Allow 3rd parties to issue their tokens on Beam. Beam said it just had some initial thoughts at that moment and planned to refine and develop the scheme in the future. Grin relies on the community governance model, and it is not controlled by any company, foundation or individual. About CA, there is only some discussion in Grin's forum, and whether Grin plans to support CA is not yet known.

Contract CA
The aforementioned contract CT schemes can also be used to implement the CA schemes, but some complex designs are required. Currently, most privacy projects based on smart contracts are designed to address the issue of how to hide transaction amount, and few projects claim to hide asset types. Besides, the gas cost is an issue that must be solved. Admittedly, contract CA technologies have a long way to go.

Design Kepler
Blockchain technology has developed for a decade. The blockchain industry has experienced the rise and fall of many technologies or applications over the past decade, but the topic of privacy protection never goes out of date. Regardless of whether the blockchain technology is used in the financial field or DApps, users' privacy needs to be protected.

As mentioned above, the current CA technology has many problems, and the software development progress is very slow, which restricts the further development of the industry. Thus, Kepler proposed a MimbleWimble-based CA implementation that can hide transaction amounts, addresses and asset types, providing the strongest privacy of all solutions to date.
Besides, Kepler hopes to a CA platform where users can issue their confidential assets and conduct confidential transactions on demand, without having to develop a complete set of CA.

Future Work
Kepler’s first version of the CA feature will be released in Q2 2020. In the future, we will continue to improve and realize the following features:
· Asset type and supply can be hidden to achieve stronger privacy.
· Assets can be destroyed.
· Users can choose whether to hide the asset type and transaction amount.
· Support for non-interactive transactions. When senders initiate transactions,
the receivers are allowed to be offline, which reduces the difficulty of trading
operations.
· Support for setting lock_height on outputs.

#KMW #KeplerNetwork #P2PB2B #cryptocurrency #blockchain #decentralization #bounty.

Author : MASJOO899
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