Project Name:
Suter Shield NEAR
Background: What problems do you aim to solve? How does it serve our mission of a user-owned internet with more privacy and self-sovereignty?
Suterusu brings unprecedented privacy protection to any platform supporting smart contracts. Suterusu already provides privacy protection for several major blockchains and dapps, such as Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain (BSC), as well as various DeFi products. By deploying Suterusu Shield on the NEAR platform, it will bring privacy-preserving payment functionality to all the dapps and users in the NEAR ecosystem.
Project Overview: What solution are you providing? Who will it serve?
Suterusu integrates a state-of-the-art trustless ZK-SNARK scheme with nearly constant size proofs (ZK-ConSNARK in short) and efficient proof generation/verification. Our scheme reduces the proof size by around 20% and improves the proof generation and verification efficiency by an order of magnitude.
Based on our ZK-ConSNARK scheme, we propose the Suterusu protocol that allows a user to convert any token issued on the NEAR network to its anonymized counterparts in the Suterusu protocol and then run the Suterusu transfer functionality to hide the transfer account identity and transferred amount. This API in combination with the Suter bridge will further allow the user to protect the payment privacy of tokens from other blockchain networks that are mapped to the NEAR blockchain.
Our product Suterusu Shield is a user interface that would allow the users of the NEAR network to invoke the private payment functionality provided by the Suterusu protocol.
Scope: What are the components or technical specs of the project? What will the final deliverable look like? How will you measure success?
Suterusu protocol has three technical modules: fund, transfer, and withdraw. The fund module will convert a token issued in the NEAR network into its anonymized version, while the withdraw module will convert the anonymized token back to its native form. The transfer module is the one that enables the confidential transfer of the anonymized token. This process will guarantee the transaction amount confidentiality and anonymity for both the sender and receiver.
Since we have already deploy Suter Shield on Ethereum and BSC, the final deliverable for this project would be the successful deployment of Suter Shield on the NEAR network.
Budget and Milestones: What grant amount are you seeking? How long do you estimate that the project will take in hours? If the project is nontrivial, please break down the project into milestones, with a clear output (e.g., low-fi mockup, MVP with two features) and include the estimated work hours for each milestone.
The total grant we are asking for is 30K USDT. The whole project is estimated to last around two and a half months.
The main milestones include:
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Our current smart contracts are written in Solidity and will be translated into Rust. Afterward, we will perform a unit test to ensure the security of the new contracts and their compatibility with the NEAR network. This would take around two months.
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Deploy the new native smart contracts on the NEAR network. The deployment and testing would probably take two weeks.
Team: Who is building this? What relevant experience do you bring to this project? Please share links to previous work. Are there skill sets you are missing that you are seeking from the community?
Dr. Huang Lin, the CTO of the Suterusu project. He is an applied cryptographer by training. He holds Ph.D. degrees in Applied cryptography and privacy-preserving distributed systems from Shanghai Jiao Tong University and the University of Florida, respectively. He worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), during which he published his first paper related to blockchain and cryptocurrency with colleagues from EPFL and Cornell IC3. He then served as an associate principal engineer in ASTRI, Hong Kong, where he was the PI of several blockchain projects supported with multi-million-HKD funds. He has published over 20 papers with 1407 citations on applied cryptography and information security.
Richard Liu, CSO of the Suterusu, previously founding partner of FBG Capital since 2017, managed over 100m usd Cayman fund and brought in Sequoia, Bitmain, Polychain, Matrix, Alibaba co-founders as LP, invested Coinlist, Blockstack, Polkadot, Dfinity, CHZ. Before that over 6 years in China Renaissance led and participated over $2.5bn private placements and M&A. Graduated from Shanghai JiaoTong University,
Jingjing Zhang, Tech VP of Suterusu, previously leads FBG-X department in research cryptocurrency and blockchain projects, and before joining FBG, he works for ByteDance as algorithm engineer in Revenue Growth department. Prior to that, he worked in eBay and Uber in US. He graduated from Cornell with a master degree in computer science.
Risks: What dependencies or obstacles do you anticipate? What contingency plans do you have in place?
As long as our re-written RUST contracts are compatible with the NEAR blockchain, we are ready to deploy the Suter Shield on the NEAR blockchain.
Community and Supporting Materials: Do you have previous projects, code commits, or experience that are relevant to this project and proposal? What community feedback or input have you received? How do you plan to share your plan and updates with the community as you proceed?
We have already deployed Suter Shield on Ethereum and BSC. Both deployments have received significant support from the community. The transaction volume of Suter Shield BSC (when we wrote this proposal) is $219,991,167 (217,738 in BNB and 91,449,300 in stable coin) and we have 2,842 total users and 10,187 total deposits. The transaction volume of Suter Shield Ethereum is $16,206,253 and we have 1,310 total users and 1,293 total deposits. For the latest figures, please check the following links: Suter Shield BSC stats, and Suter Shield ETH stats
After we receive this grant, we will work with the NEAR community to deliver the latest news about the deployment of Suter Shield on the NEAR network to both the Suter and NEAR communities.
Open Source: Is your project open source? How do you plan to license it?
Our project is partially open-source, but we do intend to hide some proprietary codes.
*Matrix: What is your handle on Matrix and have you joined our community channel #cypherpunkguild:
This is my Matrix handle: hlin100.