About XELIS:

XELIS is an innovative cryptocurrency from scratch with BlockDAG, Homomorphic Encryption, Zero-Knowledge Proof and Smart Contracts.

It’s using the famous programming language Rust, to be secure using its memory safe features and fast. Based on an event-driven system, its using asynchronous tasks for I/O (database, P2p, API).It is extremely easy to monitor the network with the event system available for developers to be notified on any events happening on the network and to be able to react instantly to them.

Main Features:
BlockDAG is enabled to improve the scalability and the security of the network.Instead of choosing between two chains during soft forks, BlockDAG merges both chains in one.

FAST 15 Second Block Architecture.

Homomorphic Encryption is enabled using ElGamal to provide privacy on transactions (transferred amounts) and balances. ElGamal cryptosystem was chosen because it’s a well known and studied encryption algorithm which has homomorphism features. ElGamal is fast and is used in combination with Ristretto255 curve to provide a good level of security (~128 bits of security).Homomorphic operations availables using ElGamal are addition/subtraction between ciphertexts and/or plaintext and multiplication against plaintext value.

Zero-Knowledge Proofs XELIS uses zero-knowledge proof to prove that a ciphertext (transferred amount which is in encrypted form) in a transaction is valid. To verify such claims, we do two verifications:

First, we verify that the transferred amount is never above encrypted balance.
Second, the proof must assert that the ciphertext is always above-or-equal to zero.
For these two checks, we use Bulletproofs(opens in a new tab), which is a non-interactive, zero-knowledge proof protocol and allows us to create two efficient range proof without any trusted setup.

Account Model (instead of UTXO like Bitcoin) was chosen in order to be faster, smaller, and easier for everyone. It allows a more flexible system than UTXO model and to have better privacy because there is no need to link inputs and outputs, which provide real fungibility.
It also enables the fast-sync feature to only download the last state of the chain instead of downloading all its history.

Pruning system is also available to reduce the size of the blockchain by removing old blocks and transactions.

P2p Encrypted Network is used to prevent any network traffic analysis and to provide better privacy. It is using the ChaCha20-Poly1305 encryption algorithm to encrypt all messages sent between nodes with a key rotation happening every GB of data sent.

Smart Contracts: We also aims to enable Smart Contract support in the future using our own interpreted language running in a Virtual Machine: XELIS-VM*