Assets and Amounts

Penumbra’s shielded pool can record arbitrary assets. To be precise, we define:

• an amount to be an untyped quantity of some asset;
• an asset type to be an ADR001-style denomination trace uniquely identifying a cross-chain asset and its provenance, such as:
  • denom (native chain A asset)
  • transfer/channelToA/denom (chain B representation of chain A asset)
  • transfer/channelToB/transfer/channelToA/denom (chain C representation of chain B representation of chain A asset)
• an asset ID to be a fixed-size hash of an asset type;
• a value to be a typed quantity, i.e., an amount and an asset id.

Penumbra deviates slightly from ADR001 in the definition of the asset ID. While ADR001 defines the IBC asset ID as the SHA-256 hash of the denomination trace, Penumbra hashes to a field element, so that asset IDs can be more easily used inside of a zk-SNARK circuit.