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โ€˜Privacy-preserving computing is the future,โ€™ says Secret Networkโ€™s Guy Zyskind after Quentin Tarantino NFT drop

November 4, 2021No Comments


On November 2, award-winning writer and director Quentin Tarantino Announced will auction seven uncut scenes of Pulp fiction as non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, embedded in the secret network (SCRT). Digitized assets will include the film's first raw scripts, as well as secrets about the film and its creators.

While the NFTs will feature public metadata, acting as a kind of front page for the underlying digitized asset, only the owner of the NFT will have access to never-before-seen content, a unique feature of the Secret Network. Regarding the launch, Tarantino said that "Secret Network and Secret NFT provide a whole new world to connect fans and artists and I am delighted to be a part of that."

Secret Network is a layer one protocol, or blockchain enhancement infrastructure, that enables the execution of default privacy smart contracts running in decentralized applications on multiple chains. This means that the protocol can obfuscate data about the sender, the receiver and the status of the transactions, thus protecting the identities of the parties. Since its launch on the mainnet in February 2020, the project appears to have gained significant traction from developers, along with a sharp rise in token prices in recent weeks.

The day after the NFT crash, Guy Zyskind, founder and CEO of SCRT Labs, spoke with Cointelegraph in an exclusive interview about the news, several major blockchain developments, upcoming highlights, and his vision regarding the Secret Network.

Cointelegraph: In your opinion, what are the advantages of minting NFT on the secret network, rather than, say, Ethereum (ETH) blockchain?

Guy Zyskind: Secret NFTs are, in essence, a superset of regular NFTs. Because it simply provides you with more functionality. Specifically, it allows you to keep data private, which means that, as in the case of Tarantino, we can have something like the actual interesting content being a secret that can only be seen by the owner or the person who buys the NFT. So in Tarantino's case, you buy the NFT, and the NFT may have some cool art that everyone can see, and that's what will happen, but the art is just the cover. Interesting stuff is kept encrypted as a secret, which is the actual handwritten script of Pulp Fiction, [containing] many secrets about the actual movie. But the only person who can see it is the owner, and that's not something you can do with normal NFTs.

Two other important features are: You can keep the NFT owner's privacy. And in Ethereum, you have a lot of these cases where if someone buys an NFT and is a known figure, that NFT becomes more valuable because people are tracking these transactions. And the third cool feature is the randomness. So there was a recent Paradigm article where they empirically showed where a lot of the big NFT releases are manipulated by bots because their randomness is not real. Public blockchains without encryption like the Secret Network cannot just do proper unpredictable randomness.

CONNECTICUT: What are some of the highlights of your next Supernova update on November 10? And where do they plan to go from there?

GZ: The next update is a tough fork. It's going to be really cool. Let's add IBC [Inter-Blockchain Communication] since we are a chain based on Cosmos, and then we are going to add a bridge to osmosis. We will be in the center of Cosmos, the Gravity DEX [Decentralized Exchange], when that is also released. We are going to be part of the Cosmos family of chains connected to IBC. We are also going to connect to Terra. In fact, we have been working with Terra for a long time on a bridge, but now we are going to connect Secret with Terra directly through this IBC.

We have made many speed improvements; the network will scale much better. We are going to reduce gas costs 10 times. Because the price of SCRT has skyrocketed, gasoline is not as cheap as it used to be.

We will improve the infrastructure for future NFT drops, future DeFi products. We are working on developer tools because we start to have a lot of incoming developers who want to build on our network. There is $ 150 million right now in developer grants being offered.

We're taking this release from Tarantino NFT, and we're going to make it into something really, really bigger where we'll hopefully bring in many more A-listers minting secret NFTs exclusively on the Secret Web. And I can tell you that since yesterday, I already have five emails from people who said "we heard about this, we want to partner with you" and a couple of big names, so I hope it becomes something really important in the future.

CONNECTICUT: What kind of progress has the Secret Network made on DeFi?

GZ: The network is about 100 times the size of me or the company I run. So we launched Secret Swap, which has almost $ 1 billion in trading volume. [annualized], and that's like a privacy-preserving DeFi exchange. But now there's also Sienna Swap, which is a company that raised $ 11 million, and has just launched its private DEX. And now they are working on private loan platforms. So that will be the first private crypto loan solution that I know of. And there is Shade, who is launching something like UST [TerraUSD], but again, it will be the first stablecoin that preserves privacy. So it will be like Monero, but a stable coin. And then they are going to launch private synthetic assets. So you will have as private gold, private shares, etc. Many of these will come later this year.

CONNECTICUT: Where would you say the technology is right now? In the future, there will potentially be a lot of sensitive personal information processed by blockchains. So, for example, will the nodes be able to process digital visual assets submitted by users, such as a driver's license or a photocopy of the passport?

GZ: An interesting use case, I know of some who are trying to take advantage of it for us, is to generate loans with insufficient collateral. In our network, we can take something like a driver's license; you can encrypt it. You can validate it for a program that has KYC encrypted [Know Your Customer] and give that person a credit score or something like that. So I definitely see that in the future. There have already been some pilots doing that. But I think it will take us a couple of years to get to that scale.

CONNECTICUT: Impressive. Would you like to share final comments, statements, or visions about the Secret Network?

GZ: For me, privacy-preserving computing is the future and it has to live in a decentralized system, like the Secret Network. So I'm happy to say that Secret Network is the only live system that can offer that. But I think that when many people listen to privacy, they think of illegal activities. But for me, the Secret Network NFTs use case and the partnership with Tarantino, where he shares his art with people who buy it, in a way that only the buyer has the power to see, sell and show it to others. people, etc. This is proof that we need privacy-preserving calculations not just for illegal activities.