Batching Flows

Penumbra’s ledger records value as it moves between different economic roles – for instance, movement between unbonded stake and delegation tokens, movement between different assets as they are traded, etc. This creates a tension between the need to reveal the total amount of value in each role as part of the public chain state, and the desire to shield value amounts in individual transactions.

To address this tension, Penumbra provides a mechanism to aggregate value flows across a batch of transactions, revealing only the total amount and not the value contributed by each individual transaction. This mechanism is built using an integer-valued homomorphic encryption scheme that supports threshold decryption, so that the network’s validators can jointly control a decryption key.

Transactions that contribute value to a batch contain an encryption of the amount. To flush the batch, the validators sum the ciphertexts from all relevant transactions to compute an encryption of the batch total, then jointly decrypt it and commit it to the chain.

This mechanism doesn’t require any coordination between the users whose transactions are batched, but it does require that the validators create and publish a threshold decryption key. To allow batching across block boundaries, Penumbra organizes blocks into epochs, and applies changes to the validator set only at epoch boundaries. Decryption keys live for the duration of the epoch, allowing value flows to be batched over any time interval from 1 block up to the length of an epoch. We propose epoch boundaries on the order of 1-3 days.

At the beginning of each epoch, the validator set performs distributed key generation to produce a decryption key jointly controlled by the validators (on an approximately stake-weighted basis) and includes the encryption key in the first block of the epoch.

Because this key is only available after the first block of each epoch, some transactions cannot occur in the first block itself. Assuming a block interval similar to the Cosmos Hub, this implies an ~8-second processing delay once per day, a reasonable tradeoff against the complexity of phased setup procedures.