Home
News
- 1 AI Startups like Blocktracer are creating threats to users’ privacy revealing detailed insights of blockchain transactions.
- 2 Secured transactions which use the zk-SNARK protocol can be used to ensure privacy.
Recently a report has been released by Forbes mentioning that AI and natural language processing are raising the privacy concerns because these are nowadays being used to analyse the financial data present on the internet and hence raising the privacy concerns. There are many startups whose names are coming in this list. Some of them are Blocktrace, Arkham and Nansen.
What are these AI tools and how do they work?
Blocktrace is an Austin based startup which was launched by the software engineer Shaun MaGruder. Blocktrace is basically an AI powered forensic and analytic service provider. The chatbot they use is called Robby the Robot. By using Block trace users can save time much more as compared to the manual process, which usually is a very time consuming process and takes one to two hours.
MaGruder explains that his startup is built for making it easy for users to quickly find user addresses and identify the transactions that occur with greater accuracy. And all these things happen with the help of an AI chatbot called Robby. MaGruder called it a combination of Chat GPT + Bitcoin. When asked about the reason for using bitcoin instead of any other currency MaGruder Relied that Bitcoin has one of the largest sample sizes and history and it also enjoys a big user base that’s why he chose Bitcoin.
These AI tools promise to help users by providing useful insight but in some or other way they are putting the user’s privacy at risk .So the crypto community should take a note of this issue and prioritise best practices to safeguard personal information. Anyone can misuse any information of ours with the help of such tools. At the end of the day the privacy and the transparency which the crypto market is promising is getting affected.
How to ensure your privacy using Secured transactions?
You must be wondering if such privacy issues are there then there must be a way to overcome such issues and maintain our privacy while investing in crypto so we have also found out a salutation for you to overcome this problem investors can use shielded transactions. To overcome these issues What are shielded transactions and how to use them is discussed i detail in the next paragraph.
Shielde transaction is a type of crypto transaction which uses an entirely different type of protocol for processing these transactions which is called Zcash’s zk-SNARK. It is basically a short form of Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge This protocol keeps the sender, receiver, and transaction amount private. With the help of this you can easily invest without revealing your true identity. But this transaction comes with a tradeoff because they are much more complicated than unshielded transactions and another drawback is that they are not compatible with all wallets and exchanges.
A shielded transaction works by a very special mechanism with the help of which only the people involved in the transactions can see it. So it basically assigns public and private keys to the sender and the receiver. The private key is used to sign the transactions and the public key is used to verify the signature with the help of this complex mechanism the sender’s address is not revealed and the transaction stays secure.
With a background in journalism, Ritika Sharma has worked with many reputed media firms focusing on general news such as politics and crime. She joined The Coin Republic as a reporter for crypto, and found a great passion for cryptocurrency, Web3, NFTs and other digital assets. She spends a lot of time researching and delving deeper into these concepts around the clock, and is a strong advocate for women in STEM.
