What's SERO ?

What's SERO ?
SERO Super-ZK Protocol confidential transactions zero-knowledge proofs NIZK blockchain privacy smart contract

The SERO system is the world's first blockchain platform to support confidential transactions based on Zero-knowledge proof and supports Turing complete smart contracts.
Current decentralized blockchain systems, such as Bitcoin and other public chain systems, have rapidly gained popularity as a valued internet infrastructure. Due to the decentralized nature of a public chain system; the system must reach a consensus on the data flow, and also needs to reach a consensus on the calculations of datasets. In the Bitcoin system, the data includes user-invoked remittance transactions, calculations of transaction verification, and UXTO updates; which require constant tracking of the user's account balance. Other type of blockchain systems, such as Ethereum, uses an account-based model to construct decentralized smart contract system.

The economic activities of organizations in the real world show the lack of privacy is the main obstacle to the wider application of decentralized smart contracts. In areas such as enterprise supply chain management, financial transactions, sealed bid auctions, social media behaviors and online shopping behaviors; there are many actions and processes that users consider to be confidential. Current anonymous blockchain systems, such as Zcash, Monero have made some progress in designing privacy-protected crypto currencies, however, these systems have abandoned programmability and have not explored programmability without exposing transaction data in plaintext to transaction verifiers or miners.

The current release of the SERO system solves the above problems. The public chain system has the following outstanding features:

NIZK Algorithm Improvement
The engineering of enhancements are based on the contents of publication of Ben-Sassoon, Eli et al., issued in 2014 - ‘Succinct Non-Interactive Zero Knowledge for a von Neumann Architecture’. The algorithm further optimized the encryption process to be applicable
in the setting of blockchain data infrastructure for the distributed network.

Encryption Process Optimization
Targeting the encryption performance issues of Zcash - the transaction often takes 1 to 2 minutes to complete. SERO CHAIN redefines the entire encryption process to reduce transaction time. The resulting performance is over ten times faster than Zcash.

Clear and Easily Expandable Blockchain Structure
SERO CHAIN rebuilt the storage structure of Ethereum; SERO structure uses the method of the combination of historical and conditional states. The design aims to achieve the privacy and security features of the Token circulating on SERO CHAIN. The resulting design offers a greater expansion capability for the entire structure. The complete data block encryption process is clear and concise; Off-chain storage structure is also included.

Support of Turing Complete Privacy Smart Contracts
Through zero-knowledge proofs and homomorphic encryption protocols, the smart contracts on the blockchain supports different modes of Turing complete operation model. DApp developers can freely choose to issue assets with or without privacy protection attributes and the publication or the privacy of calculation details; assets include tokens and tickets that store complex data structures. The privacy-protected assets, using Turing complete online smart contracts allow DApp to issue privacy-protected tokens for different scenarios such as sealed bid auctions.

Smart Contract Involving Multiple Tokens
SERO CHAIN is able to use smart contracts for the issuance and trading of anonymous digital assets and supports the exchange of multiple, differentiated digital assets issued in SERO CHAIN from the same smart contract. SERO CHAIN's smart contracts are able to perform decentralized trading of different digital assets.

Support of Selective Privacy Audit
For complex business applications, users may need a trusted third-party to conduct financial audits of transactions. Users of the SERO’s ecology are able to make their choices and decide whether to give third-parties the permission to track specific information from the relevant transaction data to facilitate audits.

Through extensive research and development, the SERO team implements Turing complete smart contracts on anonymous blockchain system; therefore, greatly expanding the application of the blockchain systems. The issue of the anonymous cryptocurrency is no longer exclusive to a few that have extensive knowledge of cryptography. General system developers, with the business needs to issue anonymous cryptocurrency, can issue their own anonymous tokens on the SERO chain and establish their own privacy ecology. The Turing complete smart contracts on the current version of the SERO chain supports the issuance and exchange of privacy tickets with complex data structures. Anonymous tickets support complex data structure greatly increase the application scope of privacy smart contracts; allowing blockchain application developers to place business-related data securely on the chain without the concern of data privacy disclosure.

To support confidential transactions, the SERO team implemented non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs library named - Super-zk (Super-zk is based on the mainstream NIZK technology). Super-zk allows the verification of validity on fully encrypted transactions. The address of all parties of the transaction and related transaction data continue to be anonymous. Super-zk has outstanding advantages compared to other anonymity methods, such as various types of coin mixers or ring signature technology. Super-zk features anonymization algorithm with extremely high security and maintains performance in different environments. The anonymous class libraries available in the field of computer science include zk-SNARKs, zk-STARKs, Bulletproofs among others. The SERO system currently uses libsnarks framework with the consideration for the maturity of the algorithm and the performance of the encryption implementation. SERO team has enhanced libsnarks library to further improve the practicality of the Super-zk system. The resulting performance is significantly faster speed for the proof generation. The improvement areas include adopting more efficient elliptic curves and the efficiency of its underlying hashing algorithms.