Welcome to the resource topic for 2025/2031
Title:
A Note on Notes: Towards Scalable Anonymous Payments via Evolving Nullifiers and Oblivious Synchronization
Authors: Sean Bowe, Ian Miers
Abstract:Anonymous payment protocols based on Zerocash (IEEE S&P 2014) have seen
widespread deployment in decentralized cryptocurrencies, as have derivative
protocols for private smart contracts. Despite their strong privacy
properties, these protocols have a fundamental scaling limitation in that
they require every consensus participant to maintain a perpetually growing
set of nullifiers— unlinkable revocation tokens used to detect
double-spending—which must be stored, queried and updated by all
validating nodes. This set grows linearly in the number of historic
transactions and cannot be discarded without the undesirable effect of
destroying unspent funds.
In this short note, we introduce a new technique that enables
continual, permanent pruning of nullifiers by validators, without imposing
significant computation, bandwidth or latency overhead for users, and
without compromising privacy. Our main contribution is a general model we
call oblivious synchronization whereby users ask untrusted remote
services (which ingest and process the public ledger) to create succinct
proofs that coins are unspent and otherwise valid. Crucially, these services
are fully oblivious to their clients' transaction details and cannot link
their clients to any transactions that ultimately appear on the public
ledger. Moreover, these services only keep ephemeral state per client and
users can freely switch between services without incurring redundant
computational effort.
ePrint: https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/2031
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