EAGER: Preserving Privacy in the Use of Digital Currencies

这个EAGER项目将对3万亿美元的数字资产市场产生更广泛的影响/商业潜力。该项目将考虑新技术是否能够在数字货币支付中为消费者或企业提供更大的隐私，以支持这个快速增长的市场的发展。拟议的工作包括核心软件和基础设施开发，以平衡用户偏好和监管要求，并努力建立一个更高效的数字支付系统。通过协作，多学科的技术研究，该项目将评估不同假设和要求下的数字货币设计选择，评估权衡，并最终了解如何设计数字货币系统，以最好地促进隐私，用户代理，创新和金融公平。后一个目标包括改善低收入和其他弱势群体的融资渠道，这是一项重要的全球挑战。由于该项目打算发布研究论文和代码，这项工作可能会促进公共和私营部门的其他人在我们的研究基础上的努力。因此，这项工作将为央行行长、政策制定者和金融服务行业提供关键的见解，因为他们正在考虑在经济中使用的数字资产的设计和潜在发行。这个EAGER项目提出在使用中央银行数字货币（CBDC）时保护隐私。该项目将评估加密方法的速度和存储影响，包括假名化、零知识证明和私人信息检索，以限制每个提供者在遵守监管的情况下看到交易参与者的信息。测试平台将基于OpenCBDC，这是一种支付模型，在该模型中，中央事务处理器将未使用的资金（称为未使用的交易输出，或UTXO）作为加密哈希进行身份验证和存储。该项目将使用两种架构解决隐私保护设计中延迟最密集的部分之一，即范围证明验证。一种是批量证明创建，证明者必须证明多个值低于指定范围。第二种是批证明验证，即验证者考虑多个证明是否全部有效。该项目存在高风险，因为目前尚不清楚这项技术是否能够充分、大规模地保护隐私，并以一种对法律、监管和政治问题敏感的方式保护隐私。它具有潜在的高回报，因为证明设计良好的数字货币可以在类似现金的水平上保护隐私，可能会影响数十年的支付工具设计。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The broader impact/commercial potential of this EAGER project will be on the $3 trillion digital asset market. The project will consider whether new technologies can afford a consumer or business greater privacy in a digital currency payment in order to support the development of this rapidly growing market. The proosed work includes core software and infrastructure development that balances users’ preferences with regulatory requirements and strives to build a more efficient digital payment system. Through collaborative, multi-disciplinary technical research, the project will evaluate digital currency design choices under different assumptions and requirements, evaluate tradeoffs, and ultimately learn how digital currency systems can be designed to best advance privacy, user agency, innovation, and financial equity. The latter objective includes improved financial access for low income and other vulnerable populations, an important global challenge. Because the project intends to release research papers and code, this work may catalyze others’ efforts in the public and private sectors to build on our research. This work will thereby provide critical insight for central bankers, policymakers, and the financial services industry as they contemplate the design and potential issuance of digital assets for use in the economy.This EAGER project proposes to preserve privacy in the use of a central bank digital currency (CBDC). The project will estimate the speed and storage implications of cryptographic approaches including pseudonymization, zero-knowledge proofs, and private information retrieval, to limit the information that each provider sees about participants in a transaction while complying with regulation. The test platform will be on OpenCBDC, a payments model in which the central transaction processor authenticates and stores unspent funds (called unspent transaction outputs, or UTXO) as cryptographic hashes. The project will address one of the most latency-intensive parts of a privacy-preserving design, namely range proof verification, using two architectures. One is batch proof creation, in which the prover must show that multiple values fall below a specified range. The second is batch proof verification, in which the verifier considers whether multiple proofs are all valid. This project presents high risks because it is unknown whether this technology can safeguard privacy adequately, at scale, and in a manner that is sensitive to legal, regulatory, and political concerns. It presents potentially high returns because demonstrating that well designed digital money can safeguard privacy at a level similar to cash could influence the design of payments instruments for decades.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.