Justin Sun: Privacy features (zk-SNARKs) on Tron’s testnet are imminent

Blockchain network Tron is getting serious about privacy.

The public blockchain is set to start trialling new privacy features called zk-SNARKs on its testnet in the next few days, Tron CEO Justin Sun told Decrypt in an interview.

Further down the line, the features will go live on the official mainnet, he said.

The new privacy features are a type of zero-knowledge proof called zk-SNARKs. They allow for transactions to be made that don’t reveal the transaction information to the network. However, this necessarily results in a less-transparent blockchain and iterations of zk-SNARKs on other blockchains have led to inflation bugs that are hard to detect.

These features will initially by available internally at Tron, but they will be publicly available to developers next week.

Said Sun: “zk-SNARKs are extremely important because they provide a new way for everyone to start using Tron with privacy protection. This is critical to lots of the crypto adopters in the industry.”

Unlike Monero, which has private transactions by default, Sun said these new privacy features will be optional on Tron. This is similar to zCash, which is one of the main proponents of zk-SNARKs.

[May 19, 03:30 UTC] This article has been amended to show the features are going live on the testnet.