Spectre Developing Private Proof-of-Stake

A little known cryptocurrency project called Spectre, which has a market capitalization of $5.7 million and whose two tokens (spectre and xspec) figure in the 500s in Coinmarketcap’s ranking of cryptocurrencies, may soon hit the spotlight as it is focusing on developing a completely private proof-of-stake.

There are already a number of alternative proof-of-stake systems that have been launched, such as EOS, Neo, TRON and Tezos, each of which has garnered a large market cap which has been pushed up by major investors.

Unique Proposition

According to the founder of Specter, the person known only by his or her pseudonym, Mandica, the biggest problem with the current proof-of-stakes is that they all have a problem with privacy within their systems.

Proof-of-stake systems give the task of verifying Blockchain transactions to delegates within the network. Even if the delegate does not identify him/herself, the systems are designed in such a way that all transactions – staked or otherwise – are traceable within the Blockchain and that all users’ balances are visible to someone who knows how to work the system.

Mandica claims that Spectre is working on various tools to make even staking private. And while this technology is not yet ready, the founder of the project claims that users will be able to keep their entire balances anonymous and will just need to stake their wallets to get more anonymous coins that no one can trace back to them.

According to Mandica, this is a completely unique proposition, as no one in the industry has yet been able to create a system that can stake anonymous coins as well as generate new anonymous coins.

How it Works

The project has been careful not to reveal details of how this new private proof-of-stake will work – even the white paper has not yet been released, though the project has promised that it is coming soon.

However, what has been revealed is that the concept has been borrowed from Monero’s ring signature technology. Ring signatures allow any delegate to sign a transaction and makes it impossible to figure out whose key signed off on it.

However, it is not a completely anonymous system, since the nodes are still able to view the transactions. And this is where the team at Spectre is developing a solution, using one-time key pairs and stealth address technology, somewhat like what Tor project does.

The team states that its new proof-of-stake mechanism will ensure complete anonymity in a way that is currently not available in the market today. According to Mandica, the best way to define the Spectre project is –

Spectre = Bitcoin + PoSv3 + anonymous transactions + Tor for stealth addresses