A Review of Stegos, a Platform for Privacy Applications

Problem Statement

The prevalence of several social media outlets online poses a lot of social benefits. It is actively bringing communities of individuals and businesses together. These platforms are so socially useful that it is almost impossible to maintain privacy. As mobile internet users communicate, trade, and collaborate, they build their internet history or portfolio and leave digital footprints. Any other user with little ICT knowledge can access this information that ought to be private.

Introduction

“The Internet never forgets” — This is a famous phrase that shows the high level of exposure that the Internet places on information. The advent of blockchain and cryptocurrency was supposed to resolve the privacy issues that come with the Internet. To some level, these technologies are providing more security but at a prolonged rate. They are more focused on increasing their financial impact on the global economy. This deficiency increases the relevance of a sustainable platform that combines privacy with unrestricted access to online services like Stegos. Stegos will implement the first completely secure and private cryptocurrency on a public blockchain. Its objectives will only be in view if there is mass adoption. To achieve this, it combines the appeal and user-friendliness of platforms like Facebook and still maintains anonymity and decentralization.

Token of the Stegos platform

Stegos will have an initial STG token supply of 1 billion. A little above half (51.25%) of the supply would be up for public sale, and the remaining percentage is for compensating team members, founders, and advisors. The funds raised from token sales will be used for expansion, to improve research and development. Some parts of the funds will also be used to foster the adoption of blockchain for any kind of business.

The advantages of Stegos

Here are some of the benefits and values; users stand to benefit from the Stegos platform.

• Stegos provides absolute privacy for users,
• Stegos effectively combines payment with messaging,
• Stegos is easily upgradable and easy to improve,
• Stegos uses the Proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus for verification and confirmation.
• Stegos includes a mobile application to offer functional services fully.

Incentives

Validation is an essential aspect of blockchain technology. In essence, a lot of the Stegos’s incentives are directed towards the validators. They get rewards concerning their stake and activity. The validators get block rewards and fees via STG tokens. This earning comes to elects of the consensus around leadership. There is also the Validator service award that rewards validators for their support on the network. Based on a cryptographic form of lottery, validators select one of them to get the award.

Stegos adopts red packets feature to increase its user-base. Stegos banks on the popularity of this feature without threatening user’s privacy. These red packets can either be public or private, and the amounts it contains can either be fixed or randomized. The red packets help to promote active involvement as it allows users to create public red packets for applications and marketplaces within Stegos.

Bottlenecks

One major problem with Stegos is traceability. Users can establish the spending history of every UTXO coin by tracing blockchain transactions back to the first block. Stegos does not store transactions in blocks, but a malicious node on the network could collect all the transaction histories and trace UTXOs. For the validation of transactions, the UTXOs must have a unique ID. This impedes the implementation of protocols to keep the origin of UTXOs hidden. A lot of resources is is going into establishing solutions for this problem. Some of the proposed solutions are coin mixers, ring signatures, zk-SNARKs, and the CoinJoin family of protocols.

The future of Stegos

One feature that is absent in Stegos at the launch of the mainnet is Mobile staking. But there are plans of introducing it as soon as possible. Mobile Staking will increase the number of validator nodes for better security and network throughput.

Stegos provides all the tools required to trade and operate their stores in complete privacy. The storefronts would be operated as mini-apps with an API to manage their inventory properly. The user’s wallet public key serves as their identity as they can communicate with one another through Stegos chat service.

Most online market places use a ranking system to validate the credibility of vendors. Stegos market place will take this to a higher level by letting users write reviews of vendors on the blockchain. The public key of users serves as signatures in the reviews. By the second quarter of 2020, Stegos will implement zk-STARKs and pruning without bootstrap nodes.

Conclusion

A platform like Stegos is what this social media age needs right now. We all should be able to make payments, store, and transmit data without sacrificing privacy. The STG token, which is the first cryptocurrency that is private, secure, and efficient, will run the Stegos ecosystem.

Website: https://stegos.com/

Github: https://github.com/stegos/stegos

White Paper: https://stegos.com/docs/stegos-whitepaper.pdf

Telegram: https://t.me/stegos4privacy