Dr. Corey Petty

A full-stack look at where blockchain privacy breaks down

Public blockchains leak sensitive metadata at nearly every stage of a transaction: from messaging and wallets to RPCs, mempools, and block builders. This article shows why blockchain privacy is a full-stack problem, and why cryptography alone can’t protect users in an increasingly centralised surveillance ecosystem.

The Anatomy of Exposure: How Blockchain Transactions Leak Information at Every Layer

Adhering to our principles is not an easy route, but it is necessary for ethically building public goods

We are building infrastructure that optimises non-zero-sum interactions, aiming to disempower bad actors without compromising on our principles. For example, censorship may be an effective solution, but it results in capture and other consequences we oppose. In this article, I’ll outline how messages sent on the blockchain can be interpreted and censored, identifying the need for censorship resistance to be built into the very bottom of the technology stack. I’ll also discuss our transformation of the original Whisper protocol into the public good Waku, and how we infuse ethics into the open source protocols we develop. 

How To Ethically Build Public Goods Infrastructure

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