Furthermore, every deposited UTXO in essence creates its personal statechain that traces the transference of possession with every transaction on the Mercury Pockets platform. For this reason Mercury Pockets customers should work together with each other, to proceed the chain of custody.
As well as, ought to customers need the trail of possession for his or her deposits broadcasted to the Bitcoin blockchain to truly switch the funds, Mercury’s interface is related to a Bitcoin node making the method fast and straightforward.
So, what does Lightning provide Mercury Pockets that it doesn’t have already got?
Privateness, Safety And Optionality If the Lightning Community is a Layer 2 scaling answer, and Mercury Pockets is a Layer 2 scaling answer, doesn’t that make them opponents? That is an incorrect lens via which to view the 2 tasks. The truth is, it could be extra correct to view them as adjoining, relatively than in opposition to at least one one other.
Accordingly, the Lightning Community is an implementation of a communication protocol via using channels, and Mercury Pockets is an implementation of statechains that leverage a product with an organization behind it.
Nonetheless, Mercury integrating its product to the Lightning Community permits Mercury customers to entry its communication protocol. This integration permits Lightning-to-Mercury transfers or vice versa, which strengthens Mercury’s use instances.
For example, at the moment, the enterprise mannequin of Mercury is to gather a price for facilitating Layer 2 transactions by charging an handle as soon as funds are broadcasted again to the Bitcoin blockchain, which customers are required to offer after they initially deposit funds. This can be a privateness concern, for the reason that handle needs to be collected upfront and saved, despite the fact that it doesn’t must be the identical handle the deposited UTXOs are coming from.
Nonetheless, with a Lightning integration, Mercury may cost the price upfront and solely want to gather a Lightning bill, storing not one of the consumer information. This might not solely be a boon for privateness, but additionally safety.
In its present state, Mercury Pockets is topic to denial-of-service (DoS) assaults, which is the place a malicious consumer spams pretend transactions to flood the community, thereby making it troublesome or inconceivable to make use of the platform. With the ability to cost Lightning invoices up entrance would drastically scale back the chance of this assault vector by putting a worth on spam and permitting extra optionality.
Thus, Lightning invoicing would additionally permit Mercury to vary its pricing mannequin fully. Much like how Opendime permits customers to transact with UTXOs positioned onto a flashdrive-like system for ease of use; Mercury customers would be capable to buy a digital type of Opendime-like actual property en masse , which might permit bulk reductions for a number of deposits.
Nonetheless, Mercury has one different improve on the horizon.
A Blind Server At present, Mercury has plans to blind its server through the fourth quarter of this yr, in response to CEO Nicholas Gregory, per an e mail correspondence Bitcoin Journal had with the Mercury staff. What does this imply?
“The blinded model of Mercury Pockets will apply cryptography in an strategy that makes it inconceivable to determine cash which were transferred or swapped,” defined Tom Trevethan, CTO of Mercury Pockets.
The corporate introduced its plans to go blind in June with an evidence of what it means to be blinded on the planet of cryptography right here. In brief, the act of blinding Mercury’s server ensures that it can not know any identifiable details about a coin which prevents censorship of cash.
