With one transaction per second, Tumblebit, an anonymous off-chain transaction tool, interchangeability is no longer a dream

There are many developments planned for the Bitcoin space, but perhaps the most important is the fungibility of the cryptocurrency. The Bitcoin community is excited about Tumblebit, a proof-of-concept project that is a trustless, anonymous payment hub.

Interchangeable digital assets

Privacy and fungibility are fundamental to most of the Bitcoin community. However, companies such as Elliptic and Chainalysis have been working on tracking software, leading to the rise of blockchain surveillance. At the same time, these companies have established direct partnerships with law enforcement and governments to facilitate their monitoring of cryptocurrency transactions. Currently, all transactions in the Bitcoin blockchain are traceable unless users use some anonymous or mixing services. It is well known that Tor and mixing services can be used to prevent external surveillance. However, mixing services are centralized and rely heavily on third parties to operate. Currently, applications that provide mixing services include Coinjoin, Joinmarket and Coinshuffle. Recently, the emergence of the new concept of Tumblebit has sparked widespread discussion. It is reported that this application can provide extremely high anonymity while providing mixing services. The development path of the Tumblebit platform was officially announced in August this year. The team members of this proof-of-concept project include Ethan Heilman, Leen AlShenibr, Foteini Baldimtsi, Alessandra Scafuro and Sharon Goldberg. The authors of the white paper come from three institutions of higher learning: Boston University, George Mason University, and North Carolina State University. The Tumblebit white paper was inspired by the concept of digital cash (ecash) proposed by David Chaum.

What is Tumblebit?

In short, Tumblebit is a decentralized, trustless currency mixing service that is compatible with the Bitcoin protocol. The platform provides an unconnectable payment service designed to conduct anonymous off-chain transactions in real time. The deployment of RSA encryption algorithm and elliptic curve digital signature algorithm (ECDSA) standard security mechanisms can ensure the anonymity and unforgeability of transactions. In addition, Tumblebit's off-chain transaction solution can provide an efficient expansion method for its protocol. The Tumblebit white paper states:

Tumblebit can increase the number of Bitcoin payments and speed up transaction processing. Today, the fastest confirmation time for Bitcoin transactions on the chain is ten minutes. Tumblebit payments are sent off-chain through Tumbler and can be completed in seconds. (Our recent deployment experiment shows that when the two parties are in different cities, the average payment speed per transaction is 1.2 seconds.)

However, Tumblebit is not ready for application yet and is still in the early stages of research and development. The development team emphasized that their code in Github is still under testing and cannot be deployed to products. The current development roadmap shows that in the future they will conduct code security, server performance, wallet compatibility, operation and supervision testing before releasing the alpha version.

Tumblebit development work is in progress

The Tumblebit protocol is a development that cannot be ignored in the Bitcoin field. With the frequent occurrence of blockchain surveillance incidents, privacy tools are particularly important. Tumblebit can provide instant anonymous transactions for the Bitcoin network, improving Bitcoin's competitiveness among other competing coins. Tumblebit developers said:

Currently, the TumbleBit system supports C++ and Python, and LibreSSL is our encryption software library. We can mix payments from 800 senders (or recipients) at the same time; related transactions are visible on the blockchain.

Most people in the cryptocurrency community are eager to witness the development of this project, as TumbleBit received great attention at the Scaling Bitcoin conference in Milan. Before the official release of this protocol, users can only rely on existing centralized mixing services. At the same time, the community is also discussing some other Bitcoin privacy protocols, including P2P encryption, Schnorr signatures, etc.