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How Confidential Assets Compare to Other Privacy Approaches

Polymesh Confidential Assets (PCA) are not “just ZK”. They target full anonymity, an account-based model, and a regulated settlement (transfers) workflow (receiver affirmation, optional mediation, and scoped audit access).

This page gives a conceptual comparison to other common privacy approaches.

Property Matrix​

The matrix below summarizes practical properties across representative systems. Symbols: ✓ = supported; ✗ = not supported; △ = possible with reasonable modifications. Transaction size is shown relative to anonymity parameter k.

SystemFull anonymityProof of balanceConcurrencyReceiver affirmationNon-interactiveMulti-party txTx size
Zerocash✓✗✓✗✓✗O(1)
Monero✗✗✓✗✓✓O(k)
zkLedger✓*✓✓✗✓✓O(k)
QuisQuis✗✗✗✗✓✓O(k)
Zether✗△✗✗✓✗O(k)
Anonymous Zether✗△✗✗✓✓O(k)
Veksel✗✗✓✗✓✗O(1)
Platypus✓△✓✓*✗✗O(1)
PEReDi✓△✓✓*✗✗O(1)
PriDe CT✗△✗✗✓✓O(k)
PARScoin✓✗✓✗✓✗O(1)
Ocash✓✗✓✗✓✓O(1)
PriFHEte✓△✗✗✓✗O(1)
Polymesh (DART)✓✓✓✓✓✓O(1)

Notes:

  • ✓* under “Full anonymity” indicates systems that target small user sets.
  • ✓* under “Receiver affirmation” reflects interactive designs where receiver affirmation is inherent.
  • This summary is adapted from public research for clarity; naming and headings are adjusted for implementation focus.

A quick mental model​

  • UTXO privacy systems (Zcash-style): spend and create notes; anonymity sets are often phrased in terms of coins/notes.
  • Account-based privacy systems (Zether-style): balances live under accounts; transactions often form an anonymity ring of size k.
  • Polymesh Confidential Assets: keep an account-style abstraction while targeting full anonymity and constant-size on-chain proofs, and add regulated-transfer mechanics.

Compared to UTXO-based shielded payments (Zerocash/Zcash-style)​

Similarities:

  • Both rely on commitments + zero-knowledge proofs.
  • Both use nullifier-like constructs to prevent double-use.
  • Both can have constant-size transactions relative to anonymity set size.

Key differences:

  • Bookkeeping model: UTXO systems distribute a user's balance across many notes; Confidential Assets use account-style state transitions.
  • Proof of balance: Confidential Assets target PoB (with counters and optional counter-updates). UTXO designs typically don't provide PoB out of the box because balances are spread across many notes.
  • Receiver affirmation: Confidential Assets include accept/reject semantics as a first-class feature.
  • Settlement legs: Confidential Assets are designed around multi-leg settlement (transfers) workflows (more like capital-markets settlement than simple payments).

Compared to ring-based privacy (Monero-style)​

Ring-based systems typically provide sender ambiguity via ring signatures and often have transaction size that grows with the ring size k.

PCA target:

  • larger anonymity sets (conceptually “all participants”),
  • constant-size on-chain proofs relative to anonymity set size,
  • explicit regulatory flow (affirmation, mediation, auditing).

Compared to account-based rings (Zether / Anonymous Zether-style)​

These designs often select a ring of size k (sender/receiver plus dummies) and prove correctness over that ring.

Typical trade-offs in ring-based account privacy:

  • transaction size and verification work can scale with k,
  • concurrency constraints (epoch-based updates, state rollovers) may appear,
  • anonymity depends on ring selection.

The design goal is to avoid a small fixed k anonymity set and to avoid requiring validators to touch “every account” on each transaction.

Compared to mixers and application-layer privacy​

Mixers can provide unlinkability for specific assets but usually:

  • don't integrate receiver-affirmation style settlement,
  • don't provide per-asset compliance access controls,
  • may not support multi-leg regulated settlement flows.

PCA bake these requirements into the protocol design.

Compared to privacy rollups​

Rollups can hide details inside an off-chain execution environment and publish proofs/data to L1.

PCA differ in that:

  • settlement workflow and compliance hooks are designed at the protocol level,
  • the model is described as an account-based anonymous payment/settlement system rather than a general-purpose private VM.

Benefits and trade-offs (practical)​

Benefits:

  • Regulated-market semantics (receiver affirmation, mediation).
  • Scoped compliance access (auditors/mediators per asset type).
  • Full anonymity goal with constant-size on-chain proofs.

Trade-offs:

  • Proof generation cost and client complexity (wallets typically need to track state and scan for relevant legs).
  • PoB is non-trivial: counters and counter-updates exist to balance verifiability against privacy leakage.
  • Key management becomes more complex (account keys, encryption keys, and signing keys).