Future Privacy Research

Celo is committed to meet the privacy needs of its users. This section describes future plans for delivering on this commitment, while also sharing the current limitations of the Celo networks.

Privacy mode

One downside to this identity protocol is that knowledge of a phone number can let anyone quickly determine the balance of the associated wallet, which of course may be unacceptable for many use cases. For these circumstances, the contract allows users to use the Attestations contract in privacy mode. In this mode, the user does not map their phone number to their wallet address, but to an account that is not meant to be the recipient of transfers. Through a registered encryption key on the user’s account on the contract, schemes can be derived to allow users to selectively reveal their true wallet addresses to authorized participants.