PIVX achieves another world first with light node Zerocoin spends

PIVX developer furszy achieves a world first in enabling light nodes to freely mint and spend using Zerocoin with his Zerocoin Light Node protocol. The Zerocoin Light Node protocol opens the path for Zerocoin use on both light wallets and mobile devices.

PIVX is globally known for innovating within the cryptocurrency space. They were the first proof of stake coin to implement the Zerocoin Protocol Oct 2017 and within 6 months, the first cryptocurrency to offer private staking with zPIV.(zPoS)

PIVX Android and Light wallet developer furszy has made history by developing the first-ever Zerocoin protocol to function on a light node. With it, light nodes can complete both Zerocoin mints and spends without needing to request or store the whole set of public commitments of Zerocoin.

A light node is a node which doesn’t require the entire blockchain to be downloaded in order to function. It instead operates by downloading the block headers and following the longest chain, relaying through random nodes or elected trusted nodes, allowing them to do the heavy lifting. However, as Zerocoin is a privacy mechanism, this alone is impractical. To solve this, furszy devised a means to outsource parts of the operation necessary without compromising anonymity in doing so. The user is able to dictate how much of the process is outsourced, where less being trusted to full nodes means longer processing time for the light node.

The benefit of this new and innovative protocol is for people can now take full advantage of Zerocoin’s advanced privacy features whiteout having to dedicate significant amounts of resources, such as hard drive space and computational power.

This also means limited devices such as smartphones can now use Zerocoin, where it was technically impossible before. To maintain the highest possible degree of privacy using this method, users can select their own personal full node as a trusted node, rather than using random nodes per use. This way no light node is ever forced to expose themselves to any unknown full node. Note that full nodes can never spend a light node user’s funds, which remain safely under the control of the light node user.

When asked how he felt about his achievement, furszy stated “I’m just really happy to enable Zerocoin on light nodes. Being the first to achieve this continues the PIVX way of always innovating!” furszy has spent many long months perfecting the protocol through code revisions, testing, vetting, and reiteration to bring us this new technology to the world.

Zerocoin Light Node protocol is enabled in the latest release of the Light wallet and Android wallet.
Android Release v 3.0.0 Features include: