By default, your entire blockchain transaction history and balances are public. All transactions can be seen on block explorers like Etherscan. Anyone who knows that you own a particular address can quickly view your payments, trace the source of your funds, calculate your holdings, and analyze your on-chain activity.
But what if you did not want your history and balances to be publicly viewed by everyone? What if you wanted anonymity and privacy when it came to your transactions?
Cyclone is built to address these problems and aims to provide enhanced economic incentives. Cyclone is a cross-chain, non-custodial, universal privacy-preserving protocol with the decentralized governance. Cyclone applies zkSNARKs to enable transactional privacy for all DeFi components by breaking the on-chain link between depositor and recipient addresses. It uses a smart contract that accepts coins/tokens deposits, which can be withdrawn by a different address. Whenever an asset is withdrawn from Cyclone, there is no way to link the withdrawal to the deposit for absolute privacy.
While Cyclone's zkSNARKs part is based on the attested implementation of tornado.cash, it offers unique values in supporting cross-chain and being the universal privacy-preserving layer for almost all DeFi components with the decentralized governance by CYC holders.
Cross-chain
Cyclone has been launched firstly on IoTeX as it is a fast and EVM-compatible blockchain with an active community. Thanks to anonymity mining and liquidity mining that properly incentive contributions to the anonymity pools, the first four anonymity pools launched got 3+ million USD TVL in a few days.
Cyclone aims to launch multiple anonymity pools for various assets on Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain (BSC), and other EVM-compatible public blockchains in Q1/Q2 2021. We will be looking at launching on Polkadot and other non-EVM public blockchains in Q3 2021. CYC will be THE TOKEN for all instances of Cyclone Protocol.
Decentralized Governance
Cyclone Protocol is governed in a decentralized way. The governance DAO lives on IoTeX blockchain while each anonymity pools live on different blockchains connected to IoTeX blockchain via bridges (such as ioTube). We estimate the governance DAO will be activated in early Q2 2021.
At least the following rights are entitled to CYC holders:
- Which blockchain to support next
- Launch a new anonymity pool with a certain asset
- Update params of an existing anonymity pool, e.g., CYC to mine per day
- Launch a new liquidity pool
- Update params of an existing liquidity pool, e.g., CYC to mine per day
- Other token economics of CYC
Universal Privacy-preserving Layer for DeFi with Yield Aggregation
Cyclone Protocol is much more than a token mixer. Cyclone protocol is the world-first protocol that supports anonymity pools aggregating yield-generating DeFi components, and it is the universal privacy-enhancement layer for all DeFi apps. It is envisioned to be a universal privacy layer for all DeFi components on various blockchains, enabling users to participate in the anonymity/liquidity mining of CYC and harvesting profits from the underlying DeFi components.
