Privacy Features Coming to Polygon

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Polygon is a second layer scaling solution for the Ethereum blockchain and has been a work horse in the DEFI and NFT world as it brings solutions for users that do not want to pay the extremely high gas fees that can occur on the Ethereum network. There are many other second layer solutions that help with this as well, but until now, none of them offered any privacy features.

Privacy is a core human right and is something that lured me into the cryptocurrency space to begin with. It’s honestly nobody’s business what you or I do with our money. The one fundamental flaw in this is idea is that most blockchains aside from say Monero and other privacy featured blockchains, is that they are open and transparent and data miners can come in and track down your transactions that could eventually lead to your real identity, say if you bought from a centralized exchange like Coinbase or Binance.

Enter ZK Proofs on Polygon

According to this post by the Polygon team, they have solved privacy issues for their blockchain by using zero knowledge proofs, or ZK Proofs for short. One of their new features being released, Polygon ID, uses ZK Proofs in a way that users can be identified based on computational proofs rather than sharing verifiable credentials with Web3 platforms. It enables on-chain authentication and eliminates the need to rely on a centralized intermediary.

According to the Polygon co-founder in the blog post, “Polygon ID is private by default, offers on-chain verification and permissionless attestation. There is nothing in the digital identity space now that ticks all these boxes.” At least in the world of EVM blockchains and second layer solutions. There are other blockchains like the Secret Network built using the Cosmos SDK that offers private smart contract solutions, but is not anywhere near as developed as Polygon or have the dapps and solutions, but they are coming.

All of this comes after Polygon purchased 2 ZK Proofs development firms late last year. If you were paying attention to this move you would have seen the writing on the walls. According to the team, the latest privacy solutions will be able to be used in the different DEFI protocols, DAOs, NFTs, and more that are on the Polygon blockchain.

Why Privacy is So Important

These are exciting times in the world of blockchain, but it is also a scary time globally with governments deciding they are going to try and stick their noses in our game. We have to be diligent if we want to protect our assets. We have seen that governments can come in and freeze bank funds, and even get to the centralized exchanges and node operators. We say this with the Infura incident, where everyone thought Metamask was limiting certain geographical regions, but it was the centralized main node operator for the Ethereum blockchain. Well with adding privacy features to Polygon, and hopefully adopted by other EVM blockchains in the future, we can take back control of our monetary privacy and tell the man where they can go, haha.

As stated before, privacy is a core human right and we need control of our privacy in all aspects of our lives. Cudos to the Polygon team for stepping out and integrating these features to help secure the privacy of its users!