Devcon VI

Penumbra: Building a Private DEX with ZKPs and Threshold Cryptography
10-12, 10:30–10:55 (America/Bogota), Talk 1

ZKPs allow transactions to prove their state transition was valid, without revealing anything about what it was. But this isn't enough, because useful applications require shared state, which ZKPs can't provide. In this talk, we'll describe how to break this barrier by combining ZKPs with flow encryption, a new threshold crypto primitive, to allow private interaction with public shared state, and how Penumbra uses this technique to build a private DEX.

Henry de Valence is the founder of Penumbra, a fully shielded cross-chain DEX and proof-of-stake network. Previously, he worked at the Zcash Foundation building Zebra, a modular Zcash fullnode implementation, and at Chain, Inc, building ZK proof infrastructure: Bulletproofs, the Ristretto group, Merlin transcripts, and curve25519-dalek.