Centralized instant exchange aggregator Houdini Swap has rolled out a private payment service allowing users to receive payments in their preferred asset without revealing their onchain address.
According to an announcement shared with Cointelegraph, Houdini Pay allows users to generate shareable payment links with support for over 4,000 digital assets across multiple blockchains. The asset is converted to the receiver’s preferred asset, and routing the payment through the system breaks the onchain link between the sender and the receiver, preventing one from snooping on the other’s wallet.
The fees incurred for using the service are those for using the Houdini Swap instant exchange aggregator on the back end and are covered by the sender. The recipient receives the full requested amount.
Payment links do not expire and can be used indefinitely. Still, they cannot be edited and feature a set requested payment amount — rather than just converting any amount sent.
Houdini Pay UI explanation. Source: HoudiniSwap
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Broken link, not guaranteed privacy
The service is centralized and compliant with Anti-Money Laundering (AML) regulations and geoblocking features. Houdini and its partners also retain transaction metadata, including the involved wallets, assets, amounts and IP addresses. The documentation also notes that “if a transaction is flagged, the exchange might request additional information per their AML policy.”
The service breaks the onchain links to protect the wallets of both payment counterparties from the other party’s prying eyes. Still, it does not provide strong, trustless cryptographic privacy guarantees.
HoudiniSwap CEO Joshua Rogers explained that the service is not a mixer. Instead, “Houdini Pay is a compliant privacy infrastructure” that does “never hold, custody, or access user crypto.”
If privacy is the top priority, then users may prefer a service such as zkBob, which uses a zero-knowledge-proof-based shielded pool to cryptographically ensure that sender, receiver, and amounts are hidden onchain. This service offers cryptographic anonymity rather than a promise not to share the data, but only supports Ether (ETH), USDt (USDT) and USDC (USDC).
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The need for crypto privacy
Houdini argues that privacy is essential for many real-world cryptocurrency applications, both for business and security reasons. With a public address, it is possible to view the current balance, all transactions made so far, the source and destination of the funds, the services interacted with, and the assets held.
Source: HoudiniSwap
Houdini points out that this is an issue in business applications, saying that clients can ”lowball freelancers after checking their wallet balances” and competitors can track supplier payments to copy strategies. Rogers claims to have “seen freelancers get their rates cut in half after clients checked their wallets.”
Houdini also raises the safety implications of having one’s assets easily visible. This year saw a rise of so-called $5 wrench attacks, which see attackers take a physical brute force approach to coerce users to part with their digital assets. Kidnappings and physical aggression against known crypto holders are becoming increasingly frequent.
In May, the French interior minister was reported to be meeting with cryptocurrency professionals in the aftermath of a violent kidnapping attempt on the family of a crypto exchange executive in Paris.
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