Tixl is a payment focused cryptocurrency with three key benefits: no fees, privacy and extremely fast transactions. Tixl was developed because the team believes that no existing digital assets meet all the requirements to become a global payment method.

I recently caught up with the Tixl team to find out what they’ve been up to and what their plans are to conquer the market.

Please introduce yourself and provide a short summary of Tixl 

We are Tixl and we come from beautiful Hamburg in Germany. In a world headed more towards digital currencies, we think it’s important to secure and preserve the essential properties of traditional money. 

Tixl transfers the properties of cash into the digital world in a traceable manner, while at the same time fulfilling the need for privacy. Tixl is established as a non-profit limited liability company which has several interesting aspects that protect potential investors which you can explore here.

There are many payment focussed cryptocurrencies. Can you explain what makes Tixl stand out from the competition? 

Before we created the technical concept, we conducted in depth analysis of the cash of today. Today’s cash enables very fast, private transactions without fees. These three characteristics were then essential for us when it came to transferring financial transactions to the digital world. 

Even though there are already solutions for all these features individually, we do not know of any cryptocurrency that can already fulfill all three properties. We have the advantage to leverage the developments and approaches of the last 10 years and to transfer them into a common concept.

Tixl is the first and currently only cryptocurrency to achieve the goal of combining the most important characteristics of today’s cash. 

The combination of fast, free and private transactions is certainly interesting. Could you give a brief explanation of the underlying technology that allows Tixl to achieve this?

Tixl uses the most sophisticated technologies to have emerged from the blockchain world over recent years. It uses a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) data structure together with the Stellar Consensus Protocol (SCP) to support fast transactions. 

Tixl also uses Zero-knowledge proofs with a commitment scheme to enable confidential transactions (hiding transaction amounts). To protect transaction senders and receivers Tixl uses stealth addresses and coin shuffling. Also, to ensure that transactions stay private in the future, quantum secure or upgradable cryptosystems are implemented to encrypt transaction details.

Is DAG superior to blockchain? 

A superiority is always dependent on what you refer to. If you consider the scalability and speed of transactions, several projects have already shown the advantages of a DAG compared to the blockchain. 

The really good privacy solutions have almost all been implemented with the classic blockchain so far. However, we have now managed to create a privacy concept for the DAG and are thus able to combine the speed, scalability and privacy. 

Private transactions are somewhat controversial. Many say that if you have nothing to hide, you don’t need privacy. How do you justify the need for privacy?

Tixl is not the first digital asset to address the need for private transactions. The number of popular privacy coins currently on the market proves that privacy is a sought after characteristic of digital assets. Among the top 50 tokens for example, Monero, Dash and Zcash all focus on private transactions. The potential for the transfer of payments within business environments, as well as private life, is huge. Besides the already mentioned privacy coins, other privacy oriented coins like Beam and Grin have appeared recently. 

No one wants the public to be able to look into their monetary transactions, whether they are governments, companies or private people. Because privacy isn’t about having something to hide. 

Privacy is probably the most important human right. It’s important to protect privacy, even for monetary transactions. 

Tixl uses the Stellar Consensus Protocol (SCP). What are the benefits of this?

SCP is known to establish consensus within a few seconds. Even if there are conflicting transactions nodes will still be able to reach consensus quickly. It’s also known that SCP can deal with high transaction volumes. Although there is no verified statement from the Stellar foundation, there are rumors that SCP can handle 10,000 transactions per second in certain network constellations.

How important do you think being an environmentally friendly crypto is? Will this become a key factor in the future? 

From our point of view, the other properties are currently more relevant. First of all, it is important that a basis is created that allows for a relevant adoption. If, at the same time, an energy-efficient solution is created due to the algorithms used, this is great and another distinguishing feature. At Tixl we have tried to take this into account as much as possible when selecting the technology.

Any global payment system will be put under periods of tremendous strain. What is the capability of Tixl in terms of scalability? 

As we have only recently released the testnet, we cannot yet give any reliable figures. In the end the consensus algorithm is usually the bottleneck. With SCP we should be quite well positioned in this respect and as mentioned above, up to 10,000 transactions per second should be possible.

As recognised in the whitepaper, the best technology doesn’t always come out on top. There’s a big leap from creating a cryptocurrency and becoming a worldwide accepted digital asset. For this to happen the crypto would have to transcend this space, something no one has achieved as of yet. How does Tixl plan to make this leap? 

First of all, we think that it is very helpful that many projects work in parallel to bring about the general adoption. It is to be observed that the adoption turns out quite differently in the different regions. Especially in more insecure regions in terms of security or low confidence in banks and in the national currency, crypto is already much more widespread as a real alternative to the traditional financial system. In the more stable regions, cryptocurrencies are currently used primarily as investment opportunities. In our view, the forthcoming regulations will make a positive contribution to taking a major step forward in general adoption in the coming years. 

As Tixl it is important to make it very easy to use, so that the entry hurdle is as low as possible and then reach people with good partnerships and effective marketing.

Thanks for taking the time for this interview. Is there anything exciting going on at Tixl right now that you’d like to talk about? 

The Tixl platform has the ideal properties needed for payments: Speed, zero transaction fees and privacy. Why not provide these properties to other digital assets as a service? In our latest status update we announced the idea to promote Tixl as a next-generation payment network for third-party digital assets, focused on transferring them quickly, cheaply and privately. For example, for Bitcoin we could be a second layer solution comparable to the Lightning network.

Alex Aves
The Daily Chain

*Disclaimer – Tixl are our Media Partners and therefore this content is sponsored by them. The fees paid by this project are used to pay for The Daily Chain salaries, dev work, hosting services, travel expenses etc.. that are required to make this company a success and continue to provide the community with great content on a daily basis.