[Analysis] Decred announces plans for privacy features development

Decred ($DCR) published a summary and overview of their plans for enhanced privacy feature development on Decred on Wednesday. According to the announcement, the strategy is designed to be consistent with Decred's PoS governance system system philosophy of building for “many birds, one stone." A high level overview of the privacy developments, according to the announcement, include:

• It is based on the CoinShuffle++ protocol from “P2P Mixing and Unlinkable Bitcoin Transactions” by Ruffing, Moreno-Sanchez and Kate.
• The mixing process is integrated with the ticket buying process, so stakeholders running ticket buying wallets can purchase tickets anonymously.
• In addition to having a denomination based on the current ticket price, smaller fixed denominations are used for mixing change and regular transactions.
• Change from the mixing process requires special handling to avoid linking unspent transaction outputs (“UTXOs”).
• There is an approximately 12x increase in on-chain transaction storage when using privacy.
• The initial release is command line interface (“CLI”) only and will only support solo stakers and non-stake transactions.