Recently, Messari hosted an AMA with Veil's founder James Burden aka 4x13 via their community group. Here are a few questions and answers from the AMA.
Messari: ...the Veil motto (is) "privacy without compromise". Can you explain what this means a little bit?
James: It means we aim to have both mandatory privacy as well as high levels of anonymity, something that is missing in most if not all privacy focused projects. Either they have high potential anonymity (Zcash) but no one uses it, or they have mandatory privacy with low anonymity (Monero). This isn't to say that these projects are bad mind you, but we want to be better.
Messari: That's what I wanted to ask about next, actually. Veil isn't the only privacy-focused project, of course. Without getting too technical, can you give a little more color to Veil's edge in the privacy space and what makes it unique? And as a corollary to that, can you share the Veil team’s thesis on why Layer 1 privacy matters?
James: Until the recent Zerocoin issue, I would say that Zerocoin has a very large anonymity set, RingCT/CT, as well as anonymous staking, x16rt mining algo and Dandelion. But we have since temp disabled the Zerocoin protocol, so we still have RingCT/CT providing privacy until we can get that fixed. in the future, things will be much better for sure.
As to the layer one privacy, analysis has shown time and time again that non-mandatory privacy is traceable, even with strong potential anonymity like in Zcash, mostly due to the end user not understanding the consequences of his actions. Having privacy on a second layer exacerbates this even more, as there would always be movement in and out of a second layer, allowing for analysis if the base layer is public.
Messari: Going forward, can you share a bit of what Q3 and Q4 2019 look like for the Veil team?
James: Q3/Q4 looks like active development on the new privacy protocol as well as a new UX/UI design to compliment the much simpler user experience, which is an area users have reached out to us on. We hear you guys. Examples would be moving to one coin type and removing the need to mint to Zerocoin, and moving away from the reliance on console commands for the regular user.
Read the entire questions and answers on Messari's blog.
Check out Messari at their website, Veil at the Veil website, and feel free to join the Veil Discord.
