Instant, untraceable payments for Cardano.

Mugraph (pronounced "mew-graph") is a Layer 2 Network for the Cardano blockchain for untraceable payments with instant finality.

By untraceable, we mean that, inside a given group $A$ of users:

• All transactions between users inside $A$ are untraceable, meaning senders and receivers are not bound in any way.
• All transactions to users outside $A$ come from a single, shared identity for all group participants.

This shared identity comes from Delegates, similar to Payment Networks in the traditional banking system, like Paypal, Venmo or CashApp, but with some crucial distinctions:

• Delegates hold funds in a fully auditable Smart Contract Vault, held in the Layer 1.
• Delegates can not spend user funds without their authorization.
• Delegates are blind, meaning they don't know who is transacting.
• Delegates provide group concealing for their users, signing transactions on behalf of them.

An user can, and usually will, hold balance in multiple Delegates at once, and they do not need to have balance in a Delegate to receive payments there.

Motivation

Why are people not using cryptocurrencies for payments?

This is the question I wanted to address when Mugraph started. Bitcoin was created to address this specific problem, yet The Lightning Network is not widely supported even in countries that adopted Bitcoin as legal tender.

Even if Cardano has much more advanced technology than Bitcoin does (like eUTXO or Smart Contracts), buying groceries with USDM remains nighly impossible.

ZeroHedge explains this phenomenon in their article "What Happened to Bitcoin?":

At the same time, new technologies were becoming available that vastly improved the efficiency and availability of exchange in fiat dollars. They included Venmo, Zelle, CashApp, FB payments, and many others besides, in addition to smartphone attachments and iPads that enabled any merchant of any size to process credit cards. These technologies were completely different from Bitcoin because they were permission-based and mediated by financial companies. But to users, they seemed great and their presence in the marketplace crowded out the use case of Bitcoin at the very time that my beloved technology had become an unrecognizable version of itself.

Excluding volatility (already being taken seriously by Stablecoins), we identified three main problems that prevent the average person from considering cryptocurrencies as a payment option:

1. Scalability: Cryptocurrency transactions are slow compared to centralized solutions. For example, credit cards have a practical confirmation limit of 2 seconds.

2. Privacy: Users do not want to reveal their identity for every purchase. Financial privacy is a human right, and in the age of big data analysis and AI, pseudonymity does not provide sufficient privacy.

3. Ease of Use: Users prefer not to deal with complex protocols, multiple wallets, or extensive security considerations.

I think that Mugraph has a real shot of solving those problems, and that's why I'm building it.

Running

With Docker

TODO.

Developing

All of the core development team uses Nix to set up the development environment, so changes in the environment setup are more likely to appear there first. With that being said, Mugraph uses stable Rust, which you can install with rustup:

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh

Then, you can build the application using cargo build, as expected.

With Nix

First, you will need Nix installed, which you can do with the Determinate Systems Nix Installer, like so:

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf -L https://install.determinate.systems/nix | sh -s -- install

Then, you can run this command to spawn a development shell:

nix develop

You can also install direnv do do this automatically when you cd to the folder. You can now build the application using Cargo:

cargo build

Licensing

Software

Mugraph, as well as all projects under the mugraph-payments is dual-licensed under the MIT and Apache 2.0 licenses.

This should cover most possible uses for this software, but if you need an exception for any reason, please do get in touch.

Logo

The project logo uses the Berkeley Mono Typeface, under a Developer License.

All graphics we create are also licensed under CC BY 4.0. It only requires attribution, but if this license is a problem for your use-case, get in touch.