Introduction

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By default, your entire blockchain transaction history and balances are public. All transactions can be seen on block explorers like Etherscan, and anyone who knows that you own a particular address can easily view your payments, trace the source of your funds, calculate your holdings, and analyze your on-chain activity.

But what if you did not want your history and balances to be publicly viewed by everyone? What if you wanted anonymity and privacy, when it came to your transactions?

Cyclone is a multi-chain, non-custodial, privacy-preserving protocol. Cyclone applies zkSNARKs to enable transactional privacy by breaking the on-chain link between depositor and recipient addresses. It uses a smart contract that accepts coins/tokens deposits, which can be withdrawn by a different address. Whenever an asset is withdrawn from Cyclone, there is no way to link the withdrawal to the deposit for absolute privacy.

Cyclone's zkSNARKs is based on the trusted code and implementation of tornado.cash, which works great on Ethereum except:

• The degree of privacy it provides is proportional to the anonymity set in each of its pools, the size of which are stagnated without a properly designed incentive mechanism;

• It only supports Ethereum and no other blockchains;

• Decentralized governance is missing to evolve the protocol itself.

Cyclone is built to address these problems and aims to provide enhanced economic incentives, multi-chain capability and decentralized governance via the $CYC token -- the core parts of its token economics are mint-n-burn, anonymity mining, and liquidity mining.

Cyclone is launching first on IoTeX as it is a fast and feature-rich blockchain with a healthy community. After that, Cyclone will launch on Ethereum, Polkadot and other mainstream public blockchains. $CYC will be the unified token for all instances of Cyclone Protocol.