Price Shielding

We've streamlined our construction to shield prices of open orders, and not a single bit more. Total buy and sell side liquidity, depth at the best bid / ask, exchange paths, and filled orders are all public by design.

This aligns with Elliptic's goals of building maximally transparent systems with the minimal shielding mechanics that people needed to build interesting applications. Our design philosophy yields the following benefits for Unyfy:

1. Fast client-side proving. We've removed all instances of merkle trees (600 constraints per hash on top of an average tree depth of 32), non-native field aritmetic (4000 constraints per mul), and group operations (2000 constraints per point mul). Our circuits are simple, and that's reflected in our proving times. The UX benefit is significant.

2. Information equity. Efforts to shield on-chain state are commonly thwarted with statistical analyses. Many protocols are theoretically hiding, but fall short in practice. The small subset of the population able to compile heuristics and develop effective models reap all of the benefits of knowing what they shouldn't. Even worse, users of the protocol operate under the assumption of complete information asymmetry when it is seldom the case. Actively shielding as little information as possible mitigates these inequities in knowledge.

3. Compliance. Providing anonymity brings unwanted illicit activity and regulatory risk. We do not provide anonymity.