I didn't quite understand. Will transactions be anonymous or public?
The Synapse platform will have full Turing-complete smart contract capabilities. This means that really anything a computer program can do will be possible using Phore smart contracts. Underlying the Phore Synapse architecture it will be using WASM (web assembly language), which will be used for execution of both shard code and smart contracts that run on shards.
There are many privacy-related features that can be built with this, either as a special-purpose shard type for private transactions, or using smart contracts that support private transactions. We have not decided which specific privacy features will be built or in what order, but part of the design goal of the architecture will give the Phore community a voice in that. We are working to allow new shard types to be built and voted on by the community, and this will allow a new shard type to be enabled without requiring a hard fork upgrade.
Using this architecture, a new shard type could be built that supports CoinJoin transactions, RingCT transactions, zk-SNARKs, or even combinations of multiple privacy technologies. People who wanted to use those features can do transactions on those shards, and people who don't want to can still do transparent / public transactions on other shard types. If there was a security vulnerability discovered for a particular privacy technology, that shard type could be disabled until it was addressed, which would shield the effect of that from the rest of the shards on the Phore platform.
The Phore team believes there are important reasons that people would want to do both transparent and private transactions. For example, if you are being paid a salary in PHR, you might not want the amount or timing or other details of that to be publicly viewable, so a private transaction might make a lot more sense for running payroll. On a personal level, perhaps you want to buy a gift for your spouse and not want the purchase to immediately show up with all the associated details for your spouse to see. On the other hand, when you are paying your taxes or utility bill using PHR, or for many other types of purchases, you might want that transaction to be transparent so that it is easy for you to point to it on the blockchain as proof that your bill was paid. If there are similar types of payments that have a requirement to be public, such as contributions to a political campaign, perhaps those would also need to be transparent. There may also be regulatory considerations in different geographies that require transparent blockchain transactions. We are building the Phore platform to be usable in all of these scenarios.
