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AirGap Enables Private Transactions On Tezos Through Sapling

The Tezos Private Transaction Landscape

Since Tezos launched mainnet in 2018, the Tezos protocol has evolved at lightning speed.

Tezos upgraded 12 times since it launched in 2018, decreasing gas fees, increasing the amount of transactions per second (tps), improving the protocol efficiency, halving blocktimes (twice) and … adding solutions from other chains. This inspired Tezos enthusiasts to coin the phrase: “Your blockchain is our testnet”.

A variation of Cosmos’ Tendermint called “Tenderbake”, introduced transaction finality, halved block time, and scaled the number of transactions per second to over the 1,000 threshold making Tezos one of the fastest decentralized blockchains in the industry.

A variation of Ethereum’s planned scaling solution “Rollups” has already been introduced through a series of upgrades, from which the latest, “Mumbai” will allow an incredible 1,000,000 tps, while simultaneously halving blocktime (again).

The Edo upgrade introduced ZCash’s Sapling to the Tezos protocol which added optional privacy-preserving smart contracts for dApps.

This means that developers can easily integrate privacy in their smart contracts, which enables them to provide private transactions and develop “privacy-conscious” applications.

The implementation of this feature was eagerly awaited by the Tezos community. 

And now AirGap announced that they have added support for Sapling on Tezos mainnet.

“We’ve been working diligently to ensure that we provide an infrastructure that supports Sapling.

With Sapling, users can now enjoy a more efficient, scalable, and private transaction experience on the Tezos blockchain.”  

Crypto is often associated with privacy and anonymity, but it falls short of providing true protection.

Due to the public nature of blockchain transactions, someone with enough resources can conduct an on-chain analysis and uncover the real identity behind a public address.

The introduction of Sapling on the Tezos blockchain aims to address this issue by providing a way for transactions to be routed through a shielded pool.

This allows for transactions to be conducted with true privacy and anonymity, ensuring that the identity of users remains protected.

With Sapling, Tezos can now provide a higher level of privacy than traditional cryptocurrencies and fiat.

Private transactions are not enabled by default on Tezos. dApps need to actively build a Sapling feature to offer their users private transactions.

This is an advantage for Tezos over other blockchains such as Zcash and Monero that offer private transactions by default.

Regulators could try to ban the use of these blockchains, but for Tezos, it would only mean that certain dApps could be banned instead of Tezos as a whole. 

For more information about how to send private transactions on Tezos with AirGap , read the AirGap announcement.  

AirGap 

AirGap is a wallet service that support several blockchains and offers the AirGap Vault and the AirGap Wallet.

AirGap Vault: Installed on a dedicated smartphone that is completely offline and has no connection to any network, thus it is air-gapped.

AirGap Wallet: The companion application to AirGap Vault installed on your every-day phone and not aware of any secrets.

AirGap is created by Papers, which we know well from the successful Tezos dApps such as DeFI platform Youves, Oracle service Acurast and voucher system Ecoo.  

For more information, check out their website or follow them on Twitter.