Good morning Lion's I trust you are keeping safe and well and winding down for the weeks end and if you're on the Eastern side of the globe it is already the weekend.
I recently read an article from @jk6276 that immediately caught my eye, it was about an air drop coming with one of the eligible tokens being Terra (Luna) stakers. As I have a small amount of Luna staked I decided to look a little more into it and it seems like a great project. If you would like to know more about the air drop and what other networks are available check our JK6276 post here
What is Shade and why is it intriguing?
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Have you ever looked at your hive/Leo wallet and amount and thought yay! I'm growing and then automatically though, hmmm everyone else can see this too and they know how much money I have. It's akin to walking around publicly with your bank balance tattooed on your forehead. It also enables hackers and scammers to know who to go after.
This can be quite dangerous in Decentralised Finance where smart contracts are visible and you can follow a hash or someone's transactions as they move about. In recent times this is how investigators found the Polygon hacker source. You might be thinking that is great, but it isn't because at current it is safer for you to use fiat. No one knows what you're spending money on or where it is going or how much you have.
Arguments can be held that hiding this publicly available information will lead to more criminal behaviour but that's not exactly accurate because if public wealth promotion stopped crime banks would be doing it. In fact openly disclosing how much wealth you do have leads to more crime and that being crimes against the person.
Shade Protocol fixes this to an extent and nothing is 100% but transactions performed on Shade are done through encrypted transactions that can only be pieced together through the use of a viewing key on the Secret network which is only in the hands of the wallet owner.
What Shade is trying to achieve is the inclusion of your human right of Privacy and be free from interference and intrusion and the ability to keep prying eyes out.
Algorithmic Peg
Move over Terra (Luna) there is a new player in town that alleges they have a better algorithmic stable coin than UST. Terra undertakes regular arbitrage to ensure UST remains pegged to $1USD. However, according to Shade there are issues with inflation which is used to pay node operators and stakers. Shade have removed inflation by having it backed by their treasury and will have collateral in the near future through product launches.
Similarly to Terra (Luna) Silk will remain it's peg by free arbitrage where is Silk has broken its peg say $1.20 you will be able to sell $1 worth of shade for $1.20 netting an additional 20c profit. This also works the other way around, but the exciting aspect that Shade is also including is it's entry and how you buy in.
Say you have Bitcoin or Ethereum and you want to jump across to shade typically you need to go to an exchange sell, move around pay fees etc. We'll not with Shade, what shade will let you do is burn your Bitcoin, Ethereum or a number of other tokens and swap straight for Shade, Silk or Secret. This is an interesting concept and will definitely make it easier for people wanting in.
Worth the watch
There is a lot to unpack in Shade but it's going to be like Terra (Luna) but with privacy. I've only managed to unpack the first 6 minutes of their info session held back in 2020. If you have a spare 30minutes I would highly recommend watching it:
you can visit their site here which include white papers for both Silk and Shade Protocol.
So what are you're thoughts, game changer?