Stealth / XST – The Holy Grail of Crypto
Stealth was created on a dedicated blockchain in 2014 and is currently one of the most technically advanced cryptocurrencies in the market.
The Holy Grail of Crypto offers fast, feeless, and private transactions. On top of these features, the underlying platform should be scalable to hundreds if not thousands of transactions per second. Junaeth, Stealth’s high performance blockchain protocol, has these four key attributes.
Junaeth is the epitome of fast, feeless, private and scalable and the foundation of our vision for XST – to be the primary private currency. And a role model for the blockchain industry.
Decentralization and transaction finality are as important as being fast and feeless. Most high performance cryptocurrencies sacrifice decentralization for scalability, some of them only have 10 validators to sign blocks.
Stealth is currently the only BTC descendant in the market to offer true feeless transactions – paving the way for blockchain adoption.
#fast
Fast transactions are fundamental to the usability of any payment system.
Stealth has fast transactions made possible by 5 second block times, providing users with a better experience. They also significantly reduce problems with online payments, and are critical to point of sale usability.
Fast transactions in XST are enabled by Junaeth. In Junaeth, block validators are required to be permanently bonded by irreversibly converting XST into assets called “StealthNodes”. Because there is a finite and known number of StealthNodes, each with a significant financial interest in the Stealth platform, the Junaeth protocol organizes block signers into a queue that signs blocks in rounds. Each round, each signer has a small window of time to validate a block. This queue, along with the financial incentives to use good hardware, ensures that blocks are signed every 5 seconds, making XST transactions so fast they are almost instant.
Block times (average block creation time) for comparison:
BTC: 10 minutes | ETH: 10-20 seconds
BTC: 10 minutes | ETH: 10-20 seconds
#feeless
The one and only way for blockchain adoption.
A feeless transaction is one that does not require an extra payment when sending coins. Fees are a critical component for practically every payment system. Transaction fees always fluctuate and are somewhat unpredictable which makes it impossible to establish a payment system that is sustainable. Ethereum fees often fluctuate so fast that transactions will be dropped by the network even when fees exceed the recommendation. In these cases the user loses the fee in addition to the inconvenience of having a transaction denied.
Fees also detract from the usability of a platform because a user must account for fees. This means users need a surplus balance for even the smallest transactions, which makes microtransactions impractical. Additionally, fees make accounting more complicated. For example, an 0.01 coin fee means a user may send 1 coin, but needs to subtract 1.01 coin from their balance. Although these inconveniences don’t make a platform unusable, they do make it less pleasing to use, potentially even having an impact on adoption.
Stealth uses Proof of Work (PoW) for feeless transactions. Instead of fees, the sender has the option of submitting a proof-of-work, where the sender’s computer must do a calculation with a known difficulty and include the results of that calculation in the spending transaction. This type of feeless system has precedence in other cryptocurrencies, demonstrating that proof-of-work is a viable anti-spam measure and enhances the user experience.
Transaction fees (average fee for a transaction) for comparison:
BTC: $4.67 | ETH: $2.15
BTC: $4.67 | ETH: $2.15
#private
Private transactions utilizing side chains and zk-SNARKs
With private transactions, Stealth will begin the use of side chains that share block validators with the main chain, called StealthCore. Users can send XST from the StealthCore main chain to the private transaction side chain, called StealthPrivate. These transactions are ratified by the complete set of Stealth validators on both chains. Coins transferred to the StealthPrivate side chain are effectively removed from StealthCore.
Users can convert XST to private coins (XSS StealthSend) on StealthPrivate and transfer them with cryptographic privacy, which uses zk-SNARKs. Users can convert private coins back to XST on StealthPrivate, and send XST to StealthCore for use with exchanges and other services.
Notably, the StealthCore can be hosted independently of StealthPrivate or any other Stealth side chain. This side chain based system keeps all private transactions off StealthCore, greatly simplifying compliance where the hosting of private transactions could be problematic, as with centralized exchanges.
Additionally the need to host just StealthCore lowers the hosting burden significantly. Exchanges and other third parties, like custodial payment processors, have no practical need to host any information outside of that which is relevant only to the liquid XST money supply on StealthCore.
StealthPrivate, and other Stealth side chains, share exactly the same security as StealthCore. Moreover, block spacings (5 seconds) and transaction throughput can be the same on StealthPrivate as on StealthCore, making the user experience for private transactions every bit as pleasing as non-private transactions on StealthCore. To this end, the transfer between chains and conversion between XST and the private currency XSS can be coupled so that users aren’t even aware of the underlying machinations that enable private transactions.
Why are private transactions important?
For most people, the privacy of any isolated transaction has little significance. But some transactions are very important. For example, tax payments or payments to debtors can reveal sensitive financial information that could compromise individuals. We have precedence for this need for privacy even at the highest levels of society. Most recently, the current President of the United States made an argument that his tax returns — and consequently his tax payments — should be private.
Even seemingly trivial payments might reveal sensitive information that could compromise one’s finances, relationships, or even survival.
#scalable
Scalability is important
As its most distilled definition, scalability of a cryptocurrency means that it can meet the demands of worldwide adoption. Typically, scalability is expressed as throughput, which is the number of transactions per second (TPS) a cryptocurrency can accommodate. Bitcoin, for example, is scalable to about 14 TPS. Bitcoin, in its current form, is not competitive with centralized payment systems, which require a much higher throughput. Consider that Visa processes about 1,700 TPS on average and PayPal about 200 TPS. While Bitcoin has tremendous value as a trustless transaction system, its adoption is stifled by the fact that it cannot compete with major payment platforms like Visa and PayPal.
TPS – Transactions per Second
number of transactions a network is capable to process
number of transactions a network is capable to process
How Stealth offers scalability
Stealth has undertaken to tackle the challenge of offering both cryptographic privacy and massive scalability. To offer these two facets of the Holy Grail of Crypto, Stealth splits the problem into its two components (privacy and scalability), then apply a different ledger technology to each component. We call this system a fused ledger, and it forms the basis for Stealth’s Junaeth protocol.
For privacy, Stealth’s Junaeth uses a technology known as a UTXO ledger. For scalability, Junaeth uses what is known as a state ledger. UTXO ledgers work like travelers’ cheques wherein the cheques can be cryptographically shuffled. This shuffling means that, when one of these cheques is spent, it is impossible to know which one it was, hiding the sender.
While UTXO ledgers can support anonymous transactions, they are less efficient than state ledgers. The essence of a state ledger is that it is based on accounts, where each account is registered with the blockchain. Sending and receiving cause the account balances to change.
State ledgers offer a number of efficiencies over UTXO ledgers. Probably the most important efficiency is that the accounts can be ordered into a queue. In cryptocurrencies, such a queue can be used to organize block signers, so that the exact account designated to sign a particular block can be known well in advance. This means that blocks can be signed in rapid succession and at regular intervals. Also, because accounts and block rewards are known, the block reward transactions don’t need to be recorded into the blockchain, saving storage. This system stands in contrast to Bitcoin and many other cryptocurrencies, where blocksigners are in competition to sign blocks. This competition is massively inefficient, and this inefficiency has a tremendous negative impact on scalability, as evidenced by Bitcoin’s low throughput.
Using our fused ledger technology, Stealth is highly efficient, offering private transactions delivered on a scalable platform that is competitive with currently well established payment systems like Visa and PayPal.
#decentralized
Junaeth – the dawn of blockchain meritocracy
StealthNodes are the block validators for Stealth’s consensus protocol, called Junaeth. Blockchain validators gain rights through purely economic mechanisms and are rewarded based solely on quantifiable performance. The Stealth network currently consists of 100 StealthNodes that ensure not only consistent blocktimes averaging at 5 seconds but also provide an incentive to their respective owners.
StealthNodes are purchased from the blockchain (from all holders of XST) by effectively burning the cost of the StealthNode. In other words, the XST spent to buy a StealthNode disappears entirely from the XST money supply. In 2021 blockchain parlance, each StealthNode can be described as a non-fungible token (NFT) that gives the owner block validation (and hence block reward) rights on the blockchain. Dr. James Stroud PhD is among the early inventors of NFTs long before it became the hype it is today. He created one of the first tradeable assets on a blockchain back in 2016, namely a complete deck of cards on BreakoutChain, the first multicurrency blockchain.
To encourage decentralization the first 100 StealthNodes were obtainable at affordable prices and came along with a unique set of characters. The complete history and current prices are accessible on stealthmonitor.org.
Junaeth is a unique reputation and stake-based consensus protocol that delivers one of the fastest blockchains in existence. Junaeth’s stake-based protocol obviates the political mess of so-called “delegated” systems where founders and insiders often have a corrupting influence on blockchain performance, governance, and development of a supporting ecosystem.
Along with being a blazing fast protocol, Junaeth is engineered to support transactions with full cryptographic privacy, making it the most technically capable consensus protocol available. Additionally, Junaeth’s consensus mechanism allows for sidechains, blockchain oracles, on-chain governance, and other advanced blockchain functionalities. For these reasons, we predict Junaeth will serve as a model for future high performance blockchains.
Fast. Secure. Reliable.
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