State of Privacy: MimbleWimble coins

In this piece, we take a look at the state of privacy in MimbleWimble, the Harry Potter-inspired protocol that has so far been implemented into four cryptocurrencies: Grin, Beam, Bitgrin, Kepler. Grin and Beam are the best-known of the bunch, with Bitgrin and Kepler the most recent implementations.

A group of Stanford University researchers introduced the BLS signature scheme in 2001 in a paper titled “Short signatures from the Weil pairing.” The paper details a method for producing short signature schemes designed for systems in which signatures are sent over a “low-bandwidth channel.” This method, when applied to blockchain-based networks, could be used to compress cryptographic signatures, opening up the doors for simpler and less resource intensive signature schemes.