A few days ago, Nikolaos Bougalis, head of the C++ development team at Ripple, presented a proposal to make XRP transactions anonymous.
As is known, Ripple’s transactions use tags to retrieve all the information related to the ledger to trace back all previous transactions involving that address. This obviously involves the fact that it is also possible to trace the various movements of the XRP tokens and how they will be used in the future, a bit like the Bitcoin blockchain.
With Ripple, even if the destination tag has over 4 billion combinations, it is always possible, as long as a considerable effort is involved, to trace the entire transaction to the starting address and then trace it back to the same person who used that address.
And this is where Bougalis’ proposal to obscure the XRP tags, and make it much more difficult to track the various movements of the transaction, comes into play, effectively increasing the privacy of this blockchain.
Bougalis himself points out that, as simple and feasible as the concept may be, it will always be necessary to contend with those making massive use of Ripple transactions, i.e. exchanges.
These platforms would have quite a few difficulties to implement a system that could be complementary with obscuring tags and allow customers to execute transactions using this system.
Many users appreciated this proposal, posting positive comments on the developer’s message.
Among other things, it is worth mentioning that many other blockchains have been deciding in recent months to integrate systems designed to make privacy a key point in their development, think of Zcash (ZEC) or Tezos (XTZ) and recently also Ethereum (ETH) with the solution proposed by Tornado Cash.
