Privacy Manifesto

We believe that there is no such thing as enough privacy in our financial world. There is only more privacy and less privacy. The lack of privacy in the Web3 world is a dire issue that prevents programmable money from becoming more powerful than traditional money systems. This will hinder the impact cryptocurrencies can have on a global level. Our multi-chain ecosystem lacks collaborative efforts for privacy creation and suffers from competitive behavior to reduce our own privacy, even under the purported guise of privacy itself.

Privacy creation systems today are inefficient because they are not interoperable. While we have made immeasurable progress in making privacy a relevant topic today, we believe that our collective effort has only solved half the problem. Today when you move your assets across chains, you lose privacy. Instead, we should strive for a world where moving your assets contributes to privacy. The mechanisms that underpin many successful protocols all function on a locking & unlocking mechanism, i.e. a mechanism for privacy growth. We can leverage this similar functionality to build connected mechanisms rather than independent ones.

Users should have privacy wherever they have and move their money. We create the most privacy by collaborating towards this goal across the entirety of the Web3 protocols and communities. Every new community wants access to liquidity and will engage in highly competitive behaviour to take it. This is narrowly focused and unsustainable. This is zero-sum. Instead, we are interested in positive-sum games. Webb creates a new platform for positive sum, privacy creation.

How we actually do it

• An interoperable shielded pool: All your holdings and all your cross-chain transfers take place in a set of interoperable shielded pools. We scale privacy across the set of bridged chains by obfuscating not just the depositors and withdrawers of assets but also the ecosystems from which these actions take place.

• A unified representation for assets: We unify your assets in holding and transit under an interoperable webb representation. We do this to grow our anonymity sets as large as possible. Rampant tokenisation has increased the fragmentation of privacy for crypto assets. In a multi-chain world, unification of assets into common representations will be the biggest contributor to privacy creation across chains.

• Fully open source: All our work is fully open source so that it's clear what goes on underneath the hood. We are fully committed to this vision and will continue to innovate in public. Outside contributors are welcome!

• Collaborative incentives: We believe that privacy creation is inherently good and desirable, therefore we are designing the Webb with collaborative incentives across development, deployment, community creation, and especially privacy creation. Anyone who deploys and integrates with us will become a key participant in our collective mission to increase our privacy.