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).

The thing is to matter.

Working on Firn Protocol. https://www.firn.cash https://discord.gg/2TPJE7CMdu

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.