David Chaum unveils Praxxis, a supposedly quantum-resistant crypto

Godfather of digital cash, David Chaum, announced a new digital currency, called Praxxis, that’s designed to work with Elixxir, his blockchain-based messaging and payments privacy platform. Chaum revealed the coin to a crowd at Berlin’s Web3 Summit today.

According to a press release, Praxxis is a scalable, private and secure cryptocurrency.

It runs on Elixxir, which is trying to fix the “metadata problem,” whereby governments have easy access to information that accompanies, say, a text message. The blockchain uses chains of intermediaries to remove such metadata. Chaum claims, “Elixxir is the only known practical way to shred the metadata we create as we live our digital lives.”

The coin’s privacy will be achieved by mixing transactions with others made by other people in order to make it hard to follow transactions on a block explorer. This is designed to make transactions more private, like physical cash, and is used by wallets such as Samourai.

 But details about how Praxxis is quantum-resistant are lacking. For now, we’ll just have to take Chaums’ word.

Praxxis was developed by WBM (World’s Best Money) Corp., which is headquartered in the Cayman Islands. Why not the US? Because it has provided more clarity over crypto-related regulations than in the US.

Chaum himself is best known for inventing the first digital currency, e-Cash, later DigiCash, in the early 1980s. He also claims to have proposed the first decentralized blockchain back in the 80s as part of his Ph.D. dissertation at Berkeley in 1982.

All will be revealed about Praxxis in a whitepaper, released “later this year.” We can’t wait.

Update [August 20, 17:00 UTC] The article originally stated that Praxxis' developers were based in the Cayman Islands. This was removed.