Paper 2025/2031

A Note on Notes: Towards Scalable Anonymous Payments via Evolving Nullifiers and Oblivious Synchronization

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.