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Abstract—Bitcoin is the first digital currency to see widespread adoption. While payments are conducted between pseudonyms, Bitcoin cannot offer strong privacy guarantees: payment trans-actions are recorded in a public decentralized ledger, from which much information can be deduced. Zerocoin (Miers et al., IEEE SP 2013) tackles some of these privacy issues by unlinking transactions from the payment’s origin. Yet, it still reveals payments ’ destinations and amounts, and is limited in functionality. In this paper, we construct a full-fledged ledger-based digital currency with strong privacy guarantees. Our results leverage recent advances in zero-knowledge Succinct Non-interactive AR-guments of Knowledge (zk-SNARKs). First, we formulate and construct decentralized anonymous payment schemes (DAP schemes). A DAP scheme enables users to directly pay each other privately: the corresponding transaction hides the payment’s origin, destination, and transferred amount. We provide formal definitions and proofs of the construction’s security. Second, we build Zerocash, a practical instantiation of our DAP scheme construction. In Zerocash, transactions are less than 1 kB and take under 6 ms to verify — orders of magnitude more efficient than the less-anonymous Zerocoin and competitive with plain Bitcoin.
Sasson et al. (Thu,) studied this question.