Privacy Sidechains for all Substrate- Based Chains
This treasury proposal aims to retro-actively cover the first 28 person days of completed work on implementing privacy sidechains for any substrate based chain. This benefits Polkadot and Kusama relaychains but also all their parachains and even solochains - without the need to change a single thing in their runtimes!
Detailed Proposal asking for 39’961 USD
Blog post about why privacy matters and our longer term vision
brenzi's presentation at Polkadot Now India 2023 [video, 12min] brenzi will present this tech at decoded '23 as well
Why should the treasury fund this?
Our offering is non-excludable, meaning we can’t limit this offering only to paying customers. So there is a free-rider issue at play: Once we release our privacy-sidechain solution, everyone can use the code to run their own sidechains, even multiple sidechains for a single parachain are possible and user fees are paid in the parachains’ native token, not TEER. Integritee invests in this important use case but will be met by competitors who just fork the code as soon as the business case works out. This is a very good thing for decentralization - but must be financed.
So, the question is not a generic “shall parachain teams get funding from the Treasury to build what they would build with VC funds anyway?”. What we offer is not a product on our parachain itself which we charge TEER for (see fee details in proposal document): We offer an L2 solution for anyone to deploy - anywhere. The question we’re asking with this proposal is, therefore: “Do you want this privacy product to be available by the end of the year for Polkadot, Kusama and their parachains, or not?”
Comments (5)
Requested

Proposal Failed
Summary
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Aye
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Aye (47)0.0 DOT
Support0.0 DOT
Nay (88)0.0 DOT
I would hardly call this retro-actively given there is no working product. What will be the entire cost of the project? Also the "friendship price" of 178 $ / h seems not very friendship like. Integritee won it's parachain almost a year ago using a crowd loan. The chain has now around 20 daily transactions on subscan. This is an awful example of how funds from trusting users are wasted. Integritee should not depend on external funding.
@5817cf38741a44ba96d2b086f thank you for sharing your concerns, which we're happy to address here.
It is retro-active in the sense that the work has been done and the issues have been closed verifiably with PRs that show the work done. We're not going to front 100% of the cost without getting a signal that the treasury wants to support this. As indicated in the proposal, the estimate for the first beta release stage on Statemint is 115 PD, so we're looking at ~165kUSD. The longer roadmap is indicated in our blog, but i.e. governance of law enforcement insight needs to be specified before efforts can be estimated. And that's a process we aim to trigger in a wider audience.
It is substantially below what we could earn for engineering where we're based (Zurich, Switzerland). Given salary expectations of devs here, this is what we can do. (ask Ajuna, w3f, Acurast....)
Integritee is not an end-user focusing parachain. Ours and our client's end-user offerings happen on L2, mostly. So comparing daily transactions on L1 to other parachains is meaningless.
It would be nice if Integritee wouldn't need external funding to build this, agreed. Without external funding, however, we will need to focus on other products, which are excludable (where we can enforce that fees must be paid in TEER in order to enjoy our network's services), in contrast to this proposed product where we can't (and that's how it should be in this case in our opinion). Still, we believe that our proposed product is highly relevant for this ecosystem. And we are capable of building it in comparatively little time thanks to the SDK we already have.
The requested fund seems to be somewhat high, but privacy is a topic that needs to be addressed, otherwise we stay in a blockchain world without privacy. Sent an Aye.
@CCTF
Providing privacy is the entire point of the parachain of Integritee. It's supposed to be a privacy chain. But I don't think this feature needs to be available on all chains as L2.
Providing privacy on all chains might have legal implications as it did for tornado.cash. The founder is in jail as far as I know.