💱 Stratis to release Bitcoin Tumbler on August 1st 💱

Stratis has announced they will be releasing the Breeze Privacy Protocol on the mainnet on August 1st. The Breeze Privacy Protocol enables Stratis Masternodes to start offering the Tumblebit feature, which is a Bitcoin tumbling service which users can use to anonymize Bitcoins.

Stratis & Bitcoin Tumblers

Stratis is a smart contract platform that's different from other platforms, because it doesn't seek to compete with Bitcoin but instead to complement it. That has been the design philosophy from the start, and it is one of the reasons why the Stratis team is looking to bring privacy to Bitcoin, as this is something that Bitcoin is still sorely lacking.

Stratis is it's own blockchain, but it can interact with the Bitcoin blockchain. Stratis itself is a Proof-of-Stake crypto that uses both regular nodes as well as Masternodes. The latter of these will have the option to start offering Bitcoin tumbling services through a Tumblebit implementation that the Stratis team has dubbed the Breeze Privacy Protocol.

Tumblebit is a newer, and more complicated but supposedly more efficient Bitcoin mixing service than older methods such as Coinjoin. The advantages of Tumblebit compared to it's predecessors are that it's a lot faster (almost instant), more anonymous and most importantly decentralized. Where centralized Bitcoing mixing services are susceptible to shutdown by government (as they have been), a decentralized version could change the playing field significantly.

Stratis Masternodes

The Breeze Privacy Protocol Tumblebit implementation is a special feature that is available to Stratis Masternodes. Offering tumbling services is an interesting proposal for Masternode owners, because it enables them to earn Bitcoin with each privacy transaction processed. Indeed, the payout is in BTC collected as a fee from the sender and distributed to the Masternode owner.

Exact details of the process are still scarce, but essentially any Bitcoin wallet can interact with Stratis Masternodes - there is no requirement to even have a Stratis wallet or STRAT tokens. You simply send in your BTC and you receive 'clean' and untraceable BTC in return.

If it sounds great to you and you'd like to operate a Stratis Masternode - don't get too excited yet. A Stratis Masternode is one of the most expensive Masternodes currently available, requiring 250.000 STRAT tokens, which is the equivalent to about $700.000 USD at today's prices. That puts a Stratis Masternode out of reach for most investors out there and accordingly the expectancy is that there will at most be a handful of Masternodes at any given time, if only because the supply of STRAT is limited. One of the reasons cited for this was that more people using the same Masternodes increases privacy, whereas a thinner spread would decrease everyone's privacy. Another reason given was that the economic incentive to run a tumbling service would decrease significantly if there is too much competition.

Live on the main Stratis blockchain

The Breeze Privacy Protocol has been in testing for a while now and Stratis has now announced the final release date to be the 1st of August - about one week from now.

source: Twitter

It should be very interesting to see how this unfolds and how the actual service will work. Being able to anonymize your Bitcoin stack is immensely powerful as a feature for a blockchain, and something that propelled Stratis into the top 10 of early 2017

I have been holding STRAT for more than a year now and my more frequent readers may have observed that I have often criticized the project for it's poor (price) performance. Indeed, holding STRAT has been a painful journey for me - despite hodling faithfully for more than a year today's token price is below what I initially paid for it (and let's not even discuss how much I lost in terms of BTC).

Despite these hardships I find that my perspective on Stratis has changed in these past months. While the price may have been lagging, I feel like Stratis is currently ahead of the pack in terms of development. While other projects are still working out the theory behind side-chains, Stratis has a working side-chain alpha already on the testnet and is now rolling out privacy features which are going to be essential for corporations to get onboarded.

I have been thinking a lot about cryptocurrency adoption lately and more specifically on how large corporations and instutions are likely to get involved. Despite many partnership announcements in the crypto space, there are very few corporations actually working with public blockchains. In fact, I think most corporations are going to end up building their own projects and blockchains. Much like how large corporations often build and maintain their own websites and datacenters too. When corporations create their own chains, I think several features will be very important for them, perhaps even necessary. Those features are scalability, privacy, smart contracts, digital identity, interoperability. Stratis now offers them a blockchain which offers them just that. And if they don't know how to build on it, Stratis has an Academy set up for them to show them. I suppose their slogan "We make blockchain easy for you" might indeed have some merit.

_{(Art by: Roy Lichtenstein)}