🗞🗞🗞Hear Ye! Hear Ye! New weekly update has arrived!

Discussed this week in the RAILGUN Weekly Update:
- Advanced Circuit Ceremonies
- $RAIL Active Governor Rewards
- @unstoppableweb integration
- @therealjmj speaking at @CoinDesk I.D.E.A.S
- Private charitable donations

https://medium.com/@Railgun_Project/railgun-weekly-update-october-26-2022-36d1640af465

WHY IS RAILGUN BETTER THAN A MIXER?

RAILGUN does not mix. Your assets are not mixed - your balance is completely different and stored in a merkle tree. That's why you can deposit any token that you want. When you unshield your token, it does not come from an IOU or any pool - it comes ONLY from your tokens in the exact place in the smart contract that you put them.

The thing is, from the outside, other people can't see the merkle tree splits. They can't see who has what, because it's encrypted. But you can see your own private balance, and your friend can see his own private balance -they are completely separate.
No mixing occurs.

You can see your own seperate balance because your private key can unencrypt just the relevant part.
That's the beauty of zero knowledge proofs.

With your private key you can see your own shielded tokens seperate to the others that were shielded.

When you unshield, those exact same tokens are the ones that come out. They don't touch any others or mix. It's impossible for other people to pull out your tokens.

It's not a mixer at all.

It's encrypted balances. You can read the wiki if you want to know how it works.

In fact, you can share your "view key" with someone else, and it will show the exact merkle tree posts of the contract where your tokens moved in, the trades you made with your balance, etc, and it's only going to show your history and nobody else's

You don't need to have any receipt or iou, your Ethereum private key accesses your RAILGUN balance and you can use it like a normal Ethereum address to dex trade, stake etc

And mixers are not ideal because you might end up getting funds that came from a dubious address.
You never have to worry about that with RAILGUN as every balance is provably seperate

It's best to never use mixers.

New issue of the Weekly $RAIL to digest away from CT chaos🗞📰🗞

In this week's edition:
- @unstoppableweb integration live 📧
- Smart contract upgrade progress 🧠
- Active Governor Rewards 🗳
- YouTube appearances and integrations 📹
- Partnerships 🤜🤛

https://medium.com/@Railgun_Project/railgun-weekly-update-november-9-2022-cc4aaceb331b

As people realise DeFi is the only way to ensure funds can be safe, more and more will want the privacy that RAILGUN gives them - better privacy than a centralized exchange, and 100% transparent and safe funds

DeFi only gets stronger each time.

:: SNAPSHOTS AND AIRDROPS ::
There will be an announcement end of this month regarding snapshots and airdrops for new chain deployments.

RAILGUN IS...
... UPGRADING TO RAILGUN 2.0?

🤯

🗞The Weekly Rail 11/16🗞

RAILGUN will go through a number of significant feature upgrades for the rest of Q4.

Loading... RAILGUN 2.0 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟦🟦🟦

https://medium.com/@Railgun_Project/railgun-weekly-update-november-16-2022-railgun-2-0-d74ef08ffece

:: Cryptography ::
RAILGUN cryptographic circuits have been audited and found safe and privacy-secure by multiple professional security auditors, including Trail of Bits, Zokyo, and SNARK experts ABDK.
There is no possible way for any individual to see a zk address wallet history without that wallet's keys.
If you are a security researcher and want to conduct a collaborative review, please DM the RAILGUN_Project Twitter!

:: Amounts ::
When you shield into RAILGUN, from the outside, on a block explorer like Etherscan it appears as some tokens going into the RAILGUN contract.
You alone, the user, can see that it's going into your unique 0zk address (others can't).
When you later Unshield, the block explorer page looks like tokens leaving the RAILGUN contract and going to a 0x address.
With RAILGUN, there's no way for a random person to know or prove that the person unshielding to a new address controls the previous address that the assets were shielded from (they also can't prove the person doesn't control it)...
The actions are all encrypted.
As a result, if "Jane Trader" shielded 104 ETH, then you unshield an unrelated 103.9 ETH the next day to your ENS address, a random man using Etherscan might try to guess your ENS address is controlled by Jane Trader because of the similar amounts. In this case, his guess is incorrect & he will have no way to be confident of this but it's all part of pattern searching.
One of the great things about RAILGUN is that you can unshield/pull out ANY amount from the contract, for example if you received 45 wETH, you could unshield it in parts, for example three steps over three weeks: 21 ETH, 15 ETH and 9 ETH to your new addresses.
This provides substantial privacy assistance & is super convenient, a great improvement over other privacy focused protocols.
TLDR:
This is a handy reminder to check the RAILGUN contract address to look at recent shields before deciding your unshield amount. Sometimes this can be helpful!