Faceless: A Cross-Platform Private Payment scheme for Human-Readable Identifiers

The payment of most popular cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin or Ethereum is based on blockchain addresses, which are usually two random strings that are not easily memorialized or managed by human beings. On the other hand, traditional payment is usually based on human-readable identifiers (HRI). We believe that the decentralized identifiers such as Ethereum naming service (ENS) combined with the users’ existing various online identities such as mobile phone numbers, social media accounts, etc, will constitute the main HRI layer for the payment network of Web 3.0, and most payments in the Web 3.0 world will happen between the HRI accounts.This work presents a cross-platform private payment scheme for HRIs, that allows a user to manage multiple HRIs with one single secret key. Our payment scheme guarantees the confidentiality of the payment amounts and the anonymity of users involved in the payment. We also provide a mechanism for verifiable HRI, which paves the way for many interesting applications such as electronic invoicing, regulation-compliant DeFi, etc.