Camo Banano

Introducing Camo BANANO — BANANO’s Privacy Layer!

It’s no secret that privacy is a highly relevant topic for cryptocurrencies these days. Neither companies nor individuals want all of…

Banano

Jun 10, 2019 • 6 min read

It’s no secret that privacy is a highly relevant topic for cryptocurrencies these days. Neither companies nor individuals want all of their information being publicly visible on a blockchain, in a way that it can be read without any restrictions by governments, family members, friends, or business competitors.

There’s currently a lot of experimentation going on in many different cryptocurrency projects, and BANANO doesn’t only offer near instant and feeless transactions, but also will have a privacy layer! We’re excited to share the progress of BANANO’s new privacy layer and announce Camo BANANO Phase 1 here, created by our core dev Coranos. Learn more below.

What the Fork is BANANO?

For those of you who don’t know BANANO yet: BANANO is a cryptocurrency (forked from NANO in April 2018) powered by DAG technology — here to distrupt the meme economy. Yes, BANANO has memes! And also feeless and near-instant transactions, a highly active community, and active technical development! The BANANO community doesn’t take themselves too seriously, but we’re here for the long run and we enjoy what we do.

See current BANANO price and market data at Coingecko. All current trading pairs and exchanges here.

On top of this, BANANO is super easy to use and puts an emphasis on free and fair distribution and crypto education. Just try our slick mobile wallet called Kalium and get your first free $BANANO from one of our faucets within minutes!

Kalium — BANANO’s mobile wallet (download)

What is Camo BANANO?

First of all, Camo BANANO Phase 1 as described here and available for now allows for confidential transactions, but not for real privacy yet. At the current stage, Camo BANANO is the equivalent of opening 20 BANANO accounts on your BANANO Vault and using all 20 accounts to do transactions, meaning that any person you’d interact with only knows 1/20th of your stack. Camo BANANO allows to make this process easier (as kind of a manual mixer) and thereby in its Phase 1 adds confidentiality to BANANO transactions as proof of concept.

Camo BANANO will, however, be further developed, and Phase 2 of Camo BANANO requires adding a new block type to the BANANO protocol, finally allowing for sum-of-squares private transactions.

Of interest for developers: Also released recently under MIT License and open to use for everyone, for every purpose (though it’s not guaranteed to be suitable for any purpose of course): BANANOjs library with Camo capability V 1.0 (check out the readme for the supported API and camo commands). BANANOjs is a JavaScript library that can be used to convert seeds to public keys, sign blocks, and more. It also has Camo BANANO functions, meaning any developer can send and receive transactions using the Camo BANANO L2 protocol, without doing this manually by using the Camo BANANO website.

How does Camo BANANO work?

Camo BANANO is a way for two parties to share an account and execute a transaction without sharing their own seed/private key, respectively. At the current stage, Camo BANANO for example allows both accounts (which can be operated by one or two parties) to send huge quantities of BANANO to each other, without them showing up on a rich list.

To use Camo BANANO, you need to have a public BANANO address that is represented by a specific address generated by the Camo BANANO website. BANANO sent to this address in order to open it doesn’t have to be kept on this address. Basically both parties (sender and recipient) use a combination of a public BANANO address and its representative to generate a shared private key, and then any BANANO sent to the address behind the shared private key can be accessed by both parties, without showing up on neither of the “public” addresses of both parties. If using all of the 20 addresses generated by the shared secret key, the transaction can further be split between 20 different accounts to hide large transactions.

How do I use Camo BANANO?

Account Setup

Visit the Camo BANANO website (Link)
Perform the following steps as the sender and let the recipient do the same on the right side:
Go to “Step 1” and click on the “New Random Seed” button
Go to “Step 2” and click on “Derive Camo And Banano Address” button
Copy your seed from “Step 1” and import it on BananoVault / Kalium
Set your “Camo Account” address as your representative
Go to “Step 3” and enter your “Camo Account” in the first field
Click on “Derive Shared Secret”

You now have your Shared Secret: you can use it as a seed for your shared account. You’re now ready to use the some of the coolest features of CAMO!

The same process explained in other words:

User A registers their Camo BANANO account. This puts 3 blocks in the blockchain with their ECDH public key.
User B registers their Camo BANANO account. This puts 3 blocks in the blockchain with their ECDH public key.
User A creates a shared seed. This puts 3 blocks in the blockchain with the shared seed.
User B reads the seed from account A’s account history. The seed is then used as a normal seed/shared secret.

Camo Feature 1: The Hidden Whale — Use CAMO to hold funds secretly

Do you want to hold millions of BANANO, but not to show up on a rich list?

This is what you have to do:

Enter your Shared Secret into BananoVault/Kalium as a Seed
Create 20 accounts under that Seed
Fill each account with 1 / 20 of the funds you want to hide (do it slowly)

Congratulations! You’re now a Hidden Whale: you’re rich but do not show up on any rich list.

Camo Feature 2: The Paranoid Monkey — Use CAMO to send funds secretly

Do you want to be able to send millions of BANANO to someone, but not show up on a whale watch?

Here’s how to do it with Camo BANANO

Have a friend set up his account as a Camo BANANO account (see account Setup above)
Look up the representative of your friend’s account and put it on the “Step 3” field (with your own Seed)
Click on “Derive Shared Secret”: you now have a Shared Secret that both you and your friend know and both can use as a Seed
Create 20 accounts under that Seed
Fill each account with 1 / 20 of the funds you want to send (do it slowly)
Tell your friend
Your friend can now use his Seed and your representative to get the Shared Secret

Congratulations! You’re now a Paranoid Monkey: you’ve sent millions of BANANO but do not show up on any whale watch.

Camo BANANO Web Interface
BANANOjs library with Camo capability V 1.0
Camo Banano Using Representatives
GIST: Camo BANANO using ECDH key exchange

Questions? Want to develop on the BANANO platform? Join our Discord Server, and get in touch with @coranos#4281 or go to the channel #frankensteins-lab.

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$BANANO is a fee-less, instant, rich in potassium cryptocurrency powered by DAG technology disrupting the meme economy.

Official Website: banano.cc
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