ZeroTrade: Privacy Respecting Assets Trading System Based on Public Ledger

摘要

Public ledger is a decentralized book keeping technology and is believed to have the potential to revolutionize many areas. Besides handling crypto-currency, public ledger can be used to tokenize arbitrary assets, and then support trading of these asset tokens in a decentralized manner. With public ledger based token trading system, users do not necessarily convert their assets to currencies, but can exchange assets directly. It also avoids unnecessary transportation as the asset only needs to be physically transferred to its last owner. Furthermore, utilization of the public ledger does not require that users have to trust each other in order to trade tokens safely. However, using decentralized public ledger for trading asset tokens raises serious privacy concerns. Because token ownership information is stored on the public ledger and disclosed to the public, anyone can uncover users trading activities and history. For a token based asset trading platform, all tokens are unique and transactions are usually two-ways or multi-ways. In response to these challenges, we propose ZeroTrade, a privacy respecting heterogeneous assets trading system that leverages various cryptography tools to conceal the exchange trace of asset tokens and takes advantage of public ledger for guaranteeing fairness of asset token exchange.