Mary | Satoshi Club:
How it Railgun work in reality? What user should do to use Railgun tools, for example, on Curve?

Emmanuel Goldstein:
Firstly, the Curve site and Uniswap website SHOULD have a button for “SWAP via RAILGUN” which will make it a private trade.

However, before they put that up, there are several community members that will host front-ends for the railgun dapp.

So you can just go to one of the Railgun websites and click
“Trade privately through Uniswap”
and connect your wallet for unlimited private trading.
That easy!

Also: mobile wallet app coming soon to your device... :)

: RAILGUN PROJECT :
Railgun is a smart contract system that gives zk-snark privacy to any transaction or smart contract interaction on Ethereum.
This means you can be untraceable when you trade, use leverage platforms, or add liquidity, with absolutely any dApp on ETH.

The team will also deploy this technology on other blockchains shortly as it is novel, but easily portable.

The code is already finished and being audited.

Basically, after Railgun contract is deployed, you will be able to send and receive, and exchange, USDT, DAI, etc. privately.


Unlike some other systems, RAILGUN is permissionless, so not just the popular tokens such as USDC & Tethers are supported, but in fact even brand new ones (Any ERC-20 token) will be natively usable in Railgun and untraceable, without any additional developer input required to support them. The same applies to dApps: there will not be any need to approve dApps or defi systems, all will be immediately usable through Railgun. It is a layer 1 system, so it has the full security of the Ethereum mining hashpower. There is no side-chain or second-layer.

Some too early have proclaimed in the past: "Zk-Snark privacy is not possible on base layer ETH!"

They were only wrong to think this because at the time, only very old systems were used that were not optimised for gas at all.
Naturally, because when we were inspired to begin work on the Railgun Project - with Ethereum as the platform - we begun with more snark-friendly hash functions from the start.
The contributors to the project have invented a number of Gas-saving innovations that not only make zk-snark privacy fast and effective on base-layer ETH, but even cheaper than moving assets through most other smart contract systems!
As this will continue to be an open source project, we anticipate for future privacy-minded developers to be inspired by these innovations and further develop upon them, both on Railgun and even other defi systems.

You might ask:
"Can Railgun be integrated with other platforms/DEXes? Such as private txns on Uni, etc.?"

Yes it can, it will be very easy (plug and play) for "use via railgun" to be added as a feature.
We will release a developer toolkit next month.

Railgun is also a gas-cheaper way to send private sends, instead of Tornado or others

What's important is that any new erc-20 will be usable the day it comes out. They don't need to be "onboarded" this makes Railgun always as fresh as the network.

Privacy is a human right.

But most importantly

Everyone who wants to keep making money, every hedge fund and every successful trader

They will need to be using RAILGUN.

I got in the crypto space back at 2017 when I enrolled in a PhD program in Cryptography, and since then I have been focusing on researching and building privacy preserving protocols on Ethereum.

Before that time, I was mainly interested in systems security, malware analysis and detection

My name is Emmanuel Goldstein, I'm an economist and developer, but you can call me Manny if you like!

Hisham has also designed and published previous defi systems, such as an eth lightning network and a private auction system.

My name is Andrey Kravchenko. I’ve been a researcher in Deep Learning for quite a long time, but also worked as a CTO for 2 startups and now have my own mobile and web app development company Vitruvian. I’ve joined the Railgun team as a project manager, working closely together with the team of researchers and developers, who are also represented in this AMA by @hgalal88.

Andrey is a Oxford University computer scientist.

Sure, so in the current crypto space, there aren't too many privacy preserving systems especially on Ethereum given its large and rich token and ecosystem. Also, with the public state of popular blockchains such as Bitcoin for example, it is really hard to gain mass adoption while these systems lack a fundamental right, which is privacy of course. So we are trying to solve this significant problem by bringing privacy to Ethereum where users can enjoy privacy to their beloved and favored tokens

Ethereum has a balance system, it's actually less private than bitcoin. It's very easy to profile you and trace you.

RAILGUN means you can build a private balance

Yeah please tell us what is Railgun? and how does it aim to solve the problem of privacy on ethereum

And: you can keep your assets in there, nobody will know how much you have, and you can trade from your Railgun balance and LP from inside there too.
It's very powerful.

True, you can enjoy shielded transactions within railgun that hides sender, recipient amount, and the token you are transacting with

Privacy and anonymity are fundamental for many aspects of financial transactions. Imagine going to your local coffee shop and then everyone in the world knowing what coffee you purchased, at what time, at what coffee shop, and how much you paid for it. However, that’s exactly what happens on public blockchains. Another use case would be coming up with a novel and highly profitable trading strategy, and even though staying anonymous everyone being able to view and copy your trading strategy on the public blockchain. That’s why at Railgun we believe it’s fundamental to bring an option of privacy to public blockchains such as Ethereum, and sooner or later all cryptocurrency projects will be heading in this direction.

does it act like a sidechain? or is it native to the main ehtereum network? and how does it work

No sidechains! No layer 2 either. No nodes.

It's 100% ethereum smart contracts. Which means it's uncensorable and the most secure possible.

Once you make something a sidechain or second layer, you add massive risk.

Railgun is built for security. Privacy itself is security of your individual power.

So Railgun is layer-1 protocol that utilizes zkSNARKs to shield transactions while still having the ability to verify its correctness without any security issues like double spending or creating money out of thin air.

With Railgun, users can simply deposit their tokens, and then get to hide their transactions among all Railgun users which is a large anonymity set compared to other already deployed protocols.

Users can also interact with DeFi in anonymous way, none will be able to link or identify who is the original address behind DeFi transaction

Also, Railgun allows users to swap their tokens privately, and we are already improving that part to bring a fully private DEX