Nightfall - Private Token and NFT Transfers on Ethereum

Nightfall

Nightfall integrates a set of smart contracts and microservices, and the ZoKrates zk-snark toolkit, to enable standard ERC-20 and ERC-721 tokens to be transacted on the Ethereum blockchain with complete privacy. It is an experimental solution and still being actively developed. We decided to share our research work in the belief that this will speed adoption of public blockchains. This is not intended to be a production-ready application and we do not recommend that you use it as such. If it accelerates your own work, then we are pleased to have helped. We hope that people will feel motivated to contribute their own ideas and improvements.

Note that this code has not yet completed a security review and therefore we strongly recommend that you do not use it in production or to transfer items of material value. We take no responsibility for any loss you may incur through the use of this code.

As well as this file, please be sure to check out:

Getting started

These instructions give the most direct path to a working Nightfall setup. The application is compute-intensive and so a high-end processor is preferred. Depending on your machine, setup can take one to several hours.

Supported hardware & prerequisites

Mac and Linux machines with at least 16GB of memory and 10GB of disk space are supported.

The Nightfall demonstration requires the following software to run:

Starting servers

Start Docker:

Start docker-proxy:

Installing Nightfall

Clone the Nightfall repository and use a terminal to enter the directory.

Next pull a compatible Docker image of ZoKrates

docker pull michaelconnor/zok:2Jan2019

Next we have to generate the keys and constraint files for Zero Knowledge Proofs (read more), this is about 7GB and depends on randomness for security. This step can take a while, depending on your hardware. Before you start, check once more that you have provisioned enough memory for Docker, as described above:

cd zkp-utils
npm ci
cd ../zkp
npm ci
npm run setup-all
cd ../

Note that this is a completely automated run: although questions will be asked by the script they will automatically receive a 'yes' answer. Manual runs are described in the readme.

Please be patient - you can check progress in the terminal window and by using docker stats in another terminal.

You just created all the files needed to generate zk-SNARKs. The proving keys, verifying keys and constraint files will allow you to create hidden tokens, move them under zero knowledge and then recover them — both for fungible (ERC-20) and non-fungible (ERC-721) tokens.

Note that there is a bug in web3js that means you can get a string of npm errors if you run npm ci more than once. If this happens to you, just delete all of the node modules and run npm ci again:

rm -rf node_modules
npm ci

Starting Nightfall

If you have pulled new changes from the repo, then first run

docker-compose build

:night_with_stars: We're ready to go! Run the demo:

./zkp-demo

and wait until you see the message Compiled successfully in the console.

This brings up each microservice using docker-compose and finally builds a UI running on a local Angular server.

Navigate your web browser to http://nightfall.docker to start using Nightfall (give everything enough time to start up). There are instructions on how to use the application in the UI.md file.

Note that ./zkp-demo has deployed an ERC-20 and ERC-721 contract for you (specifically FToken.sol and NFTokenMetada.sol). These are designed to allow anyone to mint tokens for demonstration purposes. You will probably want to curtail this behaviour in anything but a demonstration.

The UI pulls token names from the contracts you deploy. In the present case, the tokens are called EY OpsCoin for the ERC-20 and EY Token for ERC-721.

Note that it can take up to 10 mins to compute a transfer proof (depending on your machine) and the demonstration UI is intentionally modal while this happens (even though the action returns a promise). You can see what's happening if you look at the terminal where you ran ./zkp-demo.

If you want to close the application, make sure to stop containers and remove containers, networks, volumes, and images created by up, using

docker-compose down -v

To run tests (or if UI is not preferred)

After following the steps from 'Installing Nightfall' section,

There is a volume conflict sometimes, please run docker volume rm nightfall_zkp-code

Then run

make truffle-compile && make truffle-migrate && make zkp-start

and wait until you see the message VK setup complete in the console.

To run tests of ZKP service, open another terminal and run

make zkp-test

The relevant files for these tests can be found under zkp/__tests__ and offchain/__tests__ directories.

Note that, the zkp service tests take a while to run (approx. 2 hours)

Using other ERC-20 and ERC-721 contracts

Nightfall will operate with any ERC-20 and ERC-721 compliant contract. The contracts' addresses are fed into FTokenShield.sol and NFTokenShield.sol respectively during the Truffle migration and cannot be changed subsequently. If you wish to use pre-existing ERC-20 and ERC-721 contracts then edit 2_Shield_migration.js so that the address of the pre-existing ERC-20 contract is passed to FTokenShield and the address of the pre-existing ERC-721 contract is passed to NFTokenShield i.e. replace FToken.address and NFTokenMetadata.address. This can also be done from UI, by clicking on the user to go to settings, then clicking on contracts option in this page. A new shield contract address that has been deployed separately can be provided here. This new contract will be a replacement for NFTokenShield.sol or FTokenShield.sol. Each of these contracts currently shields the tokens of an ER721 or ERC20 contract instance respectively.

Using other networks

The demo mode uses Ganache-cli as a blockchain emulator. This is easier than using a true blockchain client but has the disadvantage that Ganache-cli doesn't currently support the Whisper protocol, which Nightfall uses for exchanging secrets between sender and recipient. Accordingly we've written a Whisper stub, which will emulate whisper for participants who are all on the same node server. If you want to run across multiple blockchain nodes and server instances then replace all occurrences of the words whisper-controller-stub with whisper-controller in the code — but you will need to use Geth rather than Ganache-cli and construct an appropriate Docker container to replace the Ganache one we provide

Acknowledgements

Team Nightfall thanks those who have indirectly contributed to it, with the ideas and tools that they have shared with the community:
ZoKrates
Libsnark
Zcash
GM17