BlockWallet Privacy Switch

Inspiration

I was inspired to built this project, since I myself am working on BlockWallet and we are aware of the privacy issues of connecting clients to RPC nodes through the clear-net. We have been looking at different solutions since around 2 years now and HOPR's RPCh is a nice tool to demo a possible solution using HOPR's mixnet technology.

What it does

It adds a feature to BlockWallet to use HOPR's mixnets with RPCh. This makes all the communication between client and RPC node fully private and preserves the user's privacy.

How we built it

Built it using HOPR's RPCh documentation and wallet integration guide. BlockWallet is a browser extension written in TypeScript, so the architecture and programming language had to be honored.

Challenges we ran into

The main challange I ran into was making sure that the integration is seamless, while honoring BlockWallet's approach of UX first. This means that the RPCh integration had to be done like other features as a wallet and be optimized to a state, that is almost production ready.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Proud of the seamless UX for the user. This demo shows how user could become private using RPCh with a click of a button, without having to know about the inner workings. It took a while to integrate the feature seamlessly into BlockWallet's UX and background logic, but I succeeded at the end.

What we learned

Learned that the possibility of making RPC traffic private for the user is much less far away than we thought. This demo shows that a connection to HOPR is possible right now and could boost user privacy immediately.