Private Token Transfers

Incognitee enhances your privacy while dealing with digital assets. But what does privacy mean and how does incognitee improve privacy?

First, let's explore why digital assets are generally not private. When dealing with crypto assets, your account is a pseudonym on a public ledger, much like a bank account number. Every single transaction this account does will be stored publicly forever and you have no right for deletion of the trace you left. If, at a certain point in time your pseudonym can be linked to your identity - i.e. because you send tokens to someone else - your entire behavioral history is revealed as is your balance.

Incognitee is a privacy-enhancing technology that allows you to shield your assets and transfer them privately. This means that you can send tokens to someone else without revealing your balance or transaction history. The recipient will not be able to see your balance or transaction history either. This is achieved by using a technology called trusted execution environments (TEE) . The TEEs we use are a hardware feature of server CPU's called Intel SGX. In addition, the Integritee Network , a Polkadot parachain, performs independent, decentralized remote attestation of TEEs. Moreover, it gives finality to Incognitee sidechain blocks.

Incognitee is a layer 2 solution, maintaining a private ledger secured by TEE. All your transactions are confidential, only known to and the person your transacting with. Sender, recipient and amount are invisible to the public and even to the operators of Incognitee infrastructure.

For maximal privacy, we suggest to shield your assets to incognitee and from then on transact them on incognitee only. If you need to unshield back to L1, you can still benefit from k-anonymity: the public just sees that someone out of k individuals is the originator of an unshielding event. If k is large enough, you can plausibly deny it was you. You can influence the size of k by choosing popular amounts and timing.