What is Conceal Network? $CCX

10 min readJun 22, 2018

Conceal Network is a peer-to-peer privacy-preserving network made for Private DeFi and Encrypted Communications. Conceal offers protocol-level private transactions, blockchain deposits, and on-chain encrypted messages. These unique functionalities make it effortless for everyday users to manage their finances and communicate securely and privately.

Conceal provides the ability for individuals to communicate and financially interact with each other in a totally anonymous manner.

Two persons may exchange messages, conduct business, and transact funds without ever knowing the true name, or legal identity, of the other. Interactions over networks are untraceable, via cryptographic protocols with nearly perfect assurance against any tampering.

Conceal cryptocurrency (₡CCX) is anonymous, censorship-resistant, decentralized digital money.

₡CCX mimics the properties of cash. Nobody knows how or where you spend your folding cash. You go to the ATM, take out money and you can buy an ice-cream or that pretty old chair at the neighborhood yard sale and there is no record of it anywhere, unlike with a credit card. These powerful privacy-preserving abilities will act as a critical bulwark against the inevitable rise of Panopticon digital money. They may be our only hope. The end of cash means the end of free choice. That’s where Conceal comes into the picture.

A lot of people say there is no killer app for crypto. They’re wrong. We’ve figured out how to mimic cash in an environment that is entirely focused on privacy: The biggest feature of cash is that it’s really hard to track. In other words, anonymity is the main feature of cash. Only the two parties that conducted business know it happened. Conceal (₡CCX) is the death of blockchain analysis. Conceal brings back the true anonymity of cash.

Conceal Network is a decentralized finance ecosystem, with blockchain-powered deposits paying interest rates, without involvement of financial institutions, powered by 100% open source code.

Conceal Network enables untraceable and anonymous messaging, and a secure way to transfer funds. Using a distributed public ledger, the sender and receiver are kept anonymous, a key concern in a post Snowden world. Hackers cannot trace money or messages when sent across public networks.

Conceal cryptocurrency (₡CCX) is based on the original Cryptonote protocol and runs on a secure peer-to-peer network technology to operate with no central authority. You control the private keys to your funds.

Conceal is accessible by anyone in the world regardless of their geographic location or status. Our blockchain is resistant to any kind of analysis. All your ₡CCX transactions and messages are anonymous.

Conceal avoids many concerns, e.g., technological, environmental, reputational and security, of Bitcoin, and provides a glimpse of the future.

Conceal Network is open-source, community-driven and truly decentralized. No one owns Conceal Network, everyone can take part. We take pride in the fact that every single team member came from the community. Conceal Network is fully developed and maintained solely by community volunteers. The community is the foundation of Conceal Network and everyone has a voice.

History

In September 2017, a small group of us (16 random people) met over the internet with a common interest. We discussed privacy, human rights, cryptography, economy, decentralization and cryptocurrencies. After very long discussions, we realized that there wasn’t a single cryptocurrency project that could fulfill all our expectations, of a truly privacy-protected and decentralized cash alternative. After a few months of research, we decided to start Conceal Network. In January 2018, we worked on the economic model and by April 2018, we had a proof of concept ready. Mainnet went live in May of 2018.

We agreed on four fundamental pillars that serve as the foundation for our community: privacy, social inclusion, decentralization and censorship resistance.

Features

Conceal follows Satoshi Nakamoto’s original vision of decentralized, trustless cryptocurrency, i.e., a secure digital cash operated by a network of users. Transactions are confirmed by distributed consensus, and then recorded on the blockchain immutably. Third parties do not need to be trusted to keep your money safe.

Conceal Network is a decentralized blockchain bank that permits users to anonymously send and receive funds, messages, and earn interest on deposits. This is all done using a public ledger, allowing “hack-proof” transactions.

At Conceal Network, we believe banking privacy is a fundamental right and we are paving the way to make that happen. Our primary objective is to provide a privacy framework for social inclusion through decentralization of financial services and communication. Our network is cross-platform supported and easy to use.

Conceal Network Main Features

Specifications

Privacy is vital to us. The autonomy that privacy provides is essential to Conceal Network. Privacy enables us to protect ourselves from unauthorized monitoring in our lives. This freedom gives us the ability to be who we want to be and interact with the world around us, without being judged or discriminated against. Privacy is a fundamental right for everyone.

In the beginning, Conceal had a very unique block reward scheme that increased to a max block reward, instead of decreasing as in most other Proof of Work (PoW) coins. With this simple and logical approach, we avoided the unfair enrichment of early miners during the initial stages of the project where mining difficulty is low and successfully reached one of the lowest coin emission curves throughout the crypto space without affecting mining profit. Conceal Network miners get 100% of the PoW mining fees.

Securing the network is a high priority to protect our users. Miners are a fundamental piece of securing our ecosystem, and they do all the PoW needed to validate every transaction and generate new blocks. They are an important part of our community too. Some of the most participative users are miners.

To that end, the Conceal Network community unanimously voted and adopted to radically redefine the block rewards emission model. Conceal Network successfully hard forked on December 18, 2020, at fork block is 661300 to make this happen.

The mining block reward was effectively cut in half to 6 $CCX per block and will remain fixed until the maximum supply of 200M is reached. The original emission equilibrium design between coins minted through cold staking and coins mined by PoW will remain unchanged for now.

Making $CCX more scarce, with an immediate cut to the minimum block reward of 6 $CCX, will help with future price stability and remove any needless inflation.

The project aim has remained unchanged. The focus continues to be on decentralization and the proper thing to do is make changes that support this goal. We want to give back the network to small miners and provide an environment that fosters fair distributed PoW mining for more than 100 years.

In addition, Conceal Network implemented the Cryptonight-GPU mining algorithm, developed by Psychocrypt and Fireice_uk.

Cryptonight-GPU (CN_GPU) is an ASIC, Botnet, and FPGA resistant mining algorithm that assures a fair GPU based supported network.

CN_GPU relies primarily on GPU core compute performance and is the first mining algorithm that is specifically designed to use floating point math at a single-precision (FP32).

Floating-point operations per second (or Flops), represent just how many computations (additions and multiplications) can be handled per second by a GPU. FP32 refers to the level of accuracy of those numbers (and is the number format).

A CPU generally consists of 4 to 8 CPU cores, while a GPU generally consists of hundreds of smaller cores. Since ASIC, Botnet, and FPGA builds rely on specialized low memory CPU computation, a mining algorithm based around GPU core compute performance renders them unprofitable.

GPU performance with the CN_GPU mining algorithm relies on the physical core count and its clock in MHz, making AMD and Nvidia GPUs very similar in performance.

The goal of the CN_GPU mining algorithm is to assure fair GPU mining:

AMD and NVIDIA GPU line-ups are equalized
Low-end and high-end GPUs are measured based on core compute performance (Flops performance)
To eliminate any CPU and Botnet mining advantage
To force ASIC or FPGA design to be cost-prohibitive

Miners are so important to us that we invested a lot of time and resources in developing and implementing these changes.

Below are additional Conceal Network specifications.

Conceal Network Specifications

Decentralized Finance

The primary purpose of the Conceal-DeFi ecosystem is to generate wealth while storing value over shorter or longer periods. Conceal deposits are based on Cold Staking and privacy-protected Hash Time-Locked Contracts (HTLC) technologies. Cold Staking is a timed deposit you earn compounding interest on when the locked deposit matures. Users privately choose the length of the staking period and the amount of ₡CCX to be staked. In practical terms, this means that you can begin staking ₡CCX from a wallet that can be offline. There is no need to keep a computer, mobile phone, or Virtual Private Server running 24/7, wasting energy and money. You set up your own terms for the contract privately and anonymously, in a trustless environment and without any third party involved. Yes, that’s it. Nothing else is required.

The minimum period for a Conceal deposit is one month and the maximum is one year (12 months). The annual interest rates vary from 2.9% to 6%, depending on how long you choose to lock your deposit and the amount locked. The bigger the amount and longer your deposit is locked, the higher the annual effective interest rate you will receive. Once you have made a deposit on the blockchain for a certain amount of time, it is locked in until then, and you can’t access your savings. It is a time-locked contract. Totally private, encrypted and secured by the blockchain.

Conceal-Messaging

Conceal Network offers censorship-resistant encrypted communications. A true decentralized, anonymous, untraceable, and end-to-end encrypted messaging service that operates on the blockchain provides the option of self-destructing messages.

Conceal-Pay

Conceal Pay makes it simple for businesses and people to receive payments on the Conceal Network. Conceal Pay is seamlessly integrated with the Conceal Cloud for absolute ease of use. You can easily create URLs with a simple web page where customers and friends can send you payments. Conceal Pay makes it trivial for you or your business to receive payments online, fast.

Conceal-ID

Conceal ID gives you the ability to make a memorable alias for your CCX address. You can create aliases for your wallet addresses, so your friends and partners can use easy to memorize aliases instead of long addresses. In that way, you can handle transactions in an easier and faster way. In the near future, sending and receiving messages using the ID will also be implemented in Cloud and Desktop wallet.

Conceal-Bridge

Conceal-Bridge is the tool to wrap your CCX onto the ETH, BSC, Polygon and Avalanche networks. wCCX can only be released by locking native CCX in the bridge, this is why exactly one wCCX will always be equal to one CCX. wCCX is just a representation of CCX on the EVM networks — a tokenized CCX.

Conceal-Live

Conceal Live (Clive), is a powerful privacy-protected communications software that offers peer-to-peer and end-to-end encrypted audio, video and messaging services for free.

All communications are peer-to-peer and end-to-end encrypted:

Fast. Latency and transfer speeds are greatly reduced thanks to direct peer-to-peer connections.
Autonomous. Users who are on the same local network can communicate even if they are disconnected from the internet.
Anonymous. No personal information needs to be provided when creating an account.
Secure. Uses X.509 encryption.
Unlimited. Without restriction on file size, speed, bandwidth, features, number of accounts, storage or anything else.
Ad Free. No Ads!

This private communication client is currently available for Android and Windows users with a possible future release for iOS. Clive brings private communications back to the people.

Conceal-App (formerly Conceal-Hub)

Conceal App offers a method of integration that encapsulates every Conceal Network ecosystem touchpoint into one simple UI application. Conceal App is built to house several individual modules that support each of our private DeFi and communication tools. Including:

Conceal-Wallet
Blockchain Deposits (Cold Staking)
Conceal-Messaging (Encrypted Messages in the blockchain)
Conceal-Live (Encrypted Audio & Video Calls)
Conceal-ID
Conceal-Pay (Merchant Tools)
Conceal-Bridge (BSC, ETH & Polygon)
Blockchain Explorer

In addition, Conceal App improves privacy by offering an authentication key-based system. Users will be able to create/restore wallets without a user account. There will be no need for an email/password login to use. The application will store authentication keys locally on the device.

Conceal App is available on Android, iOS, OS X, Windows, and Linux.

Exchanges

TradeOgre (Pair: CCX/BTC)

Useful Links

Website: https://conceal.network

Wiki: https://conceal.network/wiki/

Support: https://conceal.network/support

Github: https://github.com/ConcealNetwork

Discord: https://discord.gg/conceal ( also https://discord.conceal.network )

Telegram Official Channel: https://t.me/concealnetwork

Telegram User Group: https://t.me/concealnetworkusers

Twitter: https://twitter.com/ConcealNetwork