Does Zcash have plans for A Kovri like project?

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Are there any plans to create a Kovri like encrypted private overlay-network on Zcash in order to mask transaction IP ?

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Ideas along those lines have come up at Zcon, but I’m not aware of anyone seriously pursuing them.

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Ah ok. I hope more folks start looking into this. I believe that is an important piece to consider if we want ZEC to be 100% private.

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Just for completeness, I want to mention that Monero is bundling i2p-zero with its next wallet releases. It’s something Zcash can consider too.

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I researched bundling Tor and/or I2P years ago, back before launch. It was impractical back then primarily because it was virtually impossible to bundle either of them (Tor because of strange oddities; I2P because adding a full JRE dependency to the C++ daemon was completely impractical). It’s partly why I started my own implementation of I2P in Rust (but unfortunately progress on it is very slow because my Zcash day job is all-consuming).

AFAIK Tor is making some progress towards being usable as a library, but I don’t know the current status of this. i2p-zero is interesting, and only possible recently, now that Java has been modified to enable these very small JRE bundles. I should have another look…

It should also be noted that just running a Bitcoin-based node over Tor or I2P does not provide much privacy at all, because the P2P layer does not take privacy into account. See e.g. BP2014 for examples of the issues this causes. Issues like these would need to be addressed before running Zcash over an anonymity network is actually beneficial. I would hope that Monero’s P2P layer takes similar issues into account, but I don’t have any time to investigate.

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One thing that should be noted is that low latency mixnets (i2p, Tor) are the wrong tool for the job. Couple it with the fact that the project is large enough to need professional management to actually ever complete.

It isn’t really surprising that 3 years down the line Monero is looking for other options.

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There is also a C++ i2P implementation that I have been using for a year now. It works great.

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