Welcome to Webb¶
Webb is an ecosystem of privacy protocols and products for a multi-chain world. In this site, you can find information about the protocols we are actively building, the open-source repos we maintain, and other privacy related research and ideas we aim to integrate into our community.
For ways to contribute, join the discussion, or see active discussion of ideas and updates of this project, check out our Webb community forum that also features links to our Telegram, Discord, and more.
Philosophy & Ethos¶
We believe that privacy is a fundamental human right and that this needs to extend into the blockchain space sooner rather than later. On blockchain platforms today, we continually expose our data when we participate in the myriad of protocols that exist in the multi-chain world. We move assets across chains to buy NFTs, pay our contributors and employees in cryptocurrency, invest w/ cryptocurrency, and generate large amounts of data that can be mined by anyone with an internet connection.
Our mission is to change this by contributing to the growing amount of privacy tools that exist on blockchains today. We are motivated by cross-chain user behavior and want to tackle cross-chain privacy first. You can find more info about our cross-chain protocols in the Bridge Protocol section of the docs site.
Where is privacy missing today¶
Privacy is lacking in a variety of places in our current blockchain ecosystem. We don't have: 1. Privacy-preserving asset transfer across chains. 2. Privacy-preserving RPC infrastructure for users of protocols. 3. Privacy-preserving custody and exchanges w/ meaningful liquidity.
The first item is what we are tackling with the Webb bridge protocol. It is an interoperable, zero-knowledge proof based cross-chain system for privately moving assets between blockchains. It is a Privacy-as-a-Service protocol that unifies assets under consistent, interoperable representations to scale privacy sets as large as possible. We are working on a fixed-sized deposit based system and plan to build out a fully shielded, interoperable protocol in the future.
The second item is what we will tackle next first on top of the Webb bridge protocol. We aim to make privacy infrastructure easily deployable and easily usable by end products. When users of zero-knowledge-based, privacy protocols generate their zero-knowledge proofs, they need to possess private inputs. Oftentimes, retrieving the necessary private inputs requires querying public infrastructure, which exposes the user's privacy. The solution in theory is simple and harder in practice; we need to build private information retrieval systems for these datasets. As the Webb system launches and grows, we will begin integrating private information retrieval into our infrastructure.
The third item is an active research area for our project. With a private bridge protocol, it becomes possible to build novel multi-party protocols on top. We are actively investigating building privacy-preserving decentralised exchanges over the Webb bridge. These protocols can leverage advances in multi-party computation to provide both novel custody solutions of shielded assets as well as dark-pool functionality over our Webb architecture.
Contributing¶
If any of the ideas laid out here are interesting, don't hesitate to reach out on our community channels or post interesting ideas/articles on our community forum. All constructive types of contributions are welcome!