Represented by Bitcoin, people have a further understanding of the blockchain recently. As we all know, blockchain technology has the characteristics of decentralization and immutability, which makes people who believe in freedom worldwide and who advocate personal privacy not to be violated are regarded as beliefs. A lot of applications based on blockchain technology have been born along with it. For example, BTC is the representative of digital assets.

However, many people still have misunderstandings about Bitcoin and blockchain, that Bitcoin fundamentally solves the privacy problem. In fact, Bitcoin is an open and transparent ledger, transaction address, the transaction amount of every transaction are all visible. Therefore, Bitcoin can only be called "semi-anonymous", and they do not protect the privacy of users.

The huge demand for a digital asset that can completely protect personal privacy has promoted the development of another direction in the blockchain industry, that is, privacy coins.

Regarding the well-known projects that have appeared on the market and have a large number of fans, we focus on the technical level to horizontally compare and analyze five privacy coins: Zcash, Grin, Beam, and AOS.

Zcash
Zcash is a relatively well-known anonymous coin. ZCash maintains many advantages and features of Bitcoin, but pays more attention to security and privacy.

Grin
Grin neither does private equity nor any form of financing. It has always only relied on donations to advance the project, and even the cost of project code auditing is also collected from donations. Grin network is based on the MimbleWimble underlying protocol to achieve privacy protection.

Beam
Like Grin, Beam adopts the privacy coin of the MimbleWimble privacy protocol. There is no private sale or pre-mining. Under this agreement, all Beam transactions are private by default. There is no address in the system. All parties create a public multi-signature key that can verify the transaction. No one can view any private information of the sender, receiver, or transaction amount. Only the two parties know that they are doing the transaction to protect privacy.

AOS
The AOS public chain is a privacy public chain project that was hot in this year. According to their official website, it is called Anonymous Operating System. It adopts zero-knowledge proof technology. Through zero-knowledge proof, the sender, receiver, and transaction amount in blockchain transactions can be hidden in a way to achieve absolute anonymity.

No enterprises or individuals love their information is completely stored in an open database. Privacy protection has always been an important topic in the blockchain industry. Blockchain cannot solve the privacy problem, it is just a solution to authenticity. In this article, we have compared the above several representative privacy projects to start a discussion, and thanks to all the developers for their diligent efforts to let us see new directions in blockchain industry.