Captain McAteer
@firn
i realized here people actually read what I write. just to explain what I'm working on: Firn is a privacy service which evades certain inefficiencies our competitors (read: Aztec) face. it's able to do this because it uses completely different cryptography (it's account-based privacy, instead of UTXO-based privacy).
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Captain McAteer
@firn
with Firn, you can "synchronize" (i.e., determine your own account state, and in particular your account balance) in O(1) time and O(1) bandwidth. i.e. a small constant, independent of - the total state size of the system - the time elapsed / transactions posted since you last sync'd. same drill for proof-generation.
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Captain McAteer
@firn
in fact, Firn never "syncs" at all, in the sense that the Firn browser client never even caches state on the device. you can use Firn on a completely fresh—and even untrusted—device with no performance or security implications whatsoever. you can even use Firn through Tor.
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Captain McAteer
@firn
moroever, Firn's front-end only "talks to" the blockchain _through_ your wallet, and doesn't initiate any "backdoor" connections to Firn-specific services during sync/proofgen. this gives you full control over which RPC provider you use (i.e., you can select this at will in your wallet). you can even use your own node.
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Captain McAteer
@firn
the exception is when you actually kick off a private withdrawal/transfer. for privacy reasons, this _must_ be gasless. since we don't have account abstraction yet, we must implement this using the Firn Relay: an ultra-lightweight transaction forwarding service. all it does is receive your ZKP and pay the gas.
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Captain McAteer
@firn
that's it. and no IP tracking. thus Firn's liveness and efficiency guarantees have _no_ reliance on heavy off-chain infrastructure, i.e. a bundling or indexing service (euphemistically called a "roll-up"). you can generate proofs in well under a second, using your browser alone, and by talking through your RPC alone.
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Captain McAteer
@firn
in Aztec, they call this setup—i.e., unassisted proof-generation—an "emergency withdrawal". it requires that you spin up their entire "roll-up" / indexer _yourself_, locally. i'm not sure whether anyone has even tested this, and have no clue how expensive it would be.
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Captain McAteer
@firn
so some big differences. i am making a bet that these will prove to be crucial (feel free to check out Aztec's discord to see how many bugs they're already dealing with). or better yet: check out our discord 😀 always happy to talk ZK and privacy with anyone here.
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