Ripple Network Sees Its First Mixer In The Form of PathShuffle

Banks and other financial institutions all over the world are keeping a close eye on Ripple and its blockchain technology. It is evident financial institutions see the merit of blockchain technology, yet do not want to embrace bitcoin’s open standard. Ripple has built up some track record in finance already, which only attracts more attention as of late. However, PathShuffle may shake things up in a negative way.

PathShuffle is a Decentralized Ripple Coin Mixer

Most people who think of Ripple see it as a currency of little to no surprise to criminals these days. That may not necessarily be the case much longer, as Ripple has received its fix coin mixing service. Anyone in the world can now use XRP for anonymous payments, which would attract some form of criminal activity sooner or later. PathShuffle, as this service is called is a coin mixer than it fully compliant with Ripple’s network.

Executing atomic transactions across the Ripple network through a mixing service can have benefits, though. PathShuffle‘s PathJoin feature, combined with DiceMix – a peer-to-peer mixing solution – brings decentralized anonymity to the entire network moving forward. Up until now, Ripple has not been anonymous by any means, nor has there been a need for it to be. Promoting blockchain-based transactions in the financial sector does not require anonymity in the traditional sense, although Ripple’s protocol allows for certain aspects of a transaction to remain private

Since users on the Ripple network can build trust among themselves through a credit system, it seems somewhat unusual to see people develop a coin mixing service for this ecosystem. Moreover, the network can be used to settle all types of different transactions, including cryptocurrencies, fiat currency, and any other financial asset one can think of. It is a bit unclear what type of an impact PathShuffle can make on this ecosystem, or if it will be used by anyone, to begin with.

Traditional Ripple transactions only work between one sender and one recipient. This is seen as somewhat of a limitation by some, which is where PathShuffle can make a difference moving forward. PathShuffle removes this and introduced a system for transactions to include a virtually limitless number of participants. It is the first decentralized path mixing protocol that can promote the positive use cases for anonymity. Although there will always be some negative connotations when it comes to ways of anonymizing transactions, PathShuffle could be quite beneficial to the Ripple ecosystem as a whole.

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