In brief
- Anonymous phone service provider Phreeli launched in the U.S. last week.
- It enables customers to sign up for a number by providing only their zip code, while zero-knowledge proofs are used to verify bill payment.
- Zcash co-founder Zooko Wilcox was consulted on how to apply ZK proofs to prove customers have paid their bills without exposing their identities.
A new anonymous phone service has launched in the United States, enabling consumers to sign up for mobile coverage by providing nothing more than their zip codes.
Named Phreeli, the new mobile carrier requires no other personal info from customers, who can pay their monthly bill without sharing credit card or bank data with the company.
Zooko Wilcox, co-founder of privacy coin Zcash, acted as a consultant on the project, advising Phreeli on how to apply zero-knowledge proofs to bill paying.
“Phone companies are rapacious,” he told Decrypt. “They basically sell everything about you, including basically ‘every step you take’ (your fine-grained location) to more or less anybody who will pay.”
Wilcox also added that he currently pays for his phone service in cash under a fake name, and that what Phreeli is offering “has got to be better than that!”
The Zcash founder declined to delve further into Phreeli’s technicalities or what similarities it may bear with Zcash, though in a recent Wired article the firm explained that Wilcox suggested it use “zero-knowledge access passes,” resulting in its implementing a new encryption system based on ZK-proofs called “Double-Blind Armadillo.”
Using this system, Phreeli is able to prove that phone numbers have paid their bills, without keeping any details related to the method of payment.
Customers can prepay their bills using their credit card, or using privacy coins such as Zcash or Monero.
They can also tailor their particular level of anonymity, since Phreeli offers the option of providing an email address at signup, so that they can recover their account in the event of a lost phone.
They can also choose to receive their SIM card physically by providing an address, or by downloading an eSim from a site hosted by Phreeli on the Tor network.
Speaking to Wired, Phreeli founder Nicholas Merrill said that the company is not looking to accommodate individuals who break the law, but is rather a response to the sheer amount of data major phone carriers collect—and share—on their customers.
“We’re trying to help people feel more comfortable living their normal lives, where they’re not doing anything wrong, and not feel watched and exploited by giant surveillance and data mining operations,” he said. “I think it’s not controversial to say the vast majority of people want that.”
Phreeli was incorporated in 2019, and has received $5 million in funding over the past year, mostly from one unnamed angel investor.
The company is using T-Mobile as its underlying infrastructure provider, but everything else—including its approach to customer data—is handled internally.
What is Zcash?
Launched in 2016 under the Electric Coin Company and Zooko Wilcox-O’Hearn, Zcash is a privacy coin designed to hide key transaction details.
Transactions on Zcash can either be transparent, like Bitcoin, or private using zk-SNARKSs, a type of zero-knowledge proof, which enables transactions to be validated without exposing the sender, recipient and amount of funds transferred.
Like Bitcoin, Zcash has a fixed supply of 21 million coins and block reward halvings every four years.
In recent months Zcash has posted impressive gains, rallying over 660% since early September to its current price of $384. On Myriad, a prediction market owned by Decrypt’s parent company Dastan, users place a 53% chance on Zcash’s price outpacing that of fellow privacy coin Monero on Christmas Day.
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