Logo
ScienceStack
Table of Contents
Fetching ...
Sign In

Private, Anonymous, Collateralizable Commitments vs. MEV

Conor McMenamin, Vanesa Daza, Xavier Salleras

TL;DR

The paper tackles pervasive MEV in DeFi by introducing PACCs, a framework that privately and anonymously collateralizes commitments using smart contract wallets and zero‑knowledge proofs. PACCs enable a commitment to a transaction without revealing its content, with a relayer incentivized to include the commitment in the chain and collateral locked to deter non‑execution; the model shifts MEV away from extraction toward censorship, mitigated by price and protocol design choices. The authors provide a full protocol, an on‑chain/off‑chain implementation in Solidity on Ethereum, and benchmarks showing feasible proof generation/verification times and gas costs, while outlining scalable paths via batching and layer‑2 solutions. The work demonstrates that PACCs can enable sealed‑bid auctions, FBAs, RFQs, and MEV‑aware AMMs, potentially reducing MEV across DEXs, liquidations, and AMMs, with the main practical trade‑off being relayer collateral dependency and censorship costs. Overall, PACCs offer a decentralized, private mechanism to realize collateralized commitments that preserve user privacy while addressing MEV, presenting significant implications for DeFi robustness and future cryptographic protocol design.

Abstract

In this work, we introduce the private, anonymous, collateralizable commitments (PACCs) framework. PACCs allow any smart contract wallet holder to collateralize a claim, request, or commitment in general, in a private and anonymous manner. PACCs can prove arbitrarily much or little about the wallet generating the commitment, and/or the transaction which is being committed. We demonstrate that PACCs can be applied to effectively eliminate maximal-extractable value (MEV) in DeFi where it currently occurs, shifting MEV instead to censorship. After describing our protocol with detail, we provide an implementation using the Ethereum blockchain, and whose benchmarks prove how PACCs are completely feasible.

Private, Anonymous, Collateralizable Commitments vs. MEV

TL;DR

The paper tackles pervasive MEV in DeFi by introducing PACCs, a framework that privately and anonymously collateralizes commitments using smart contract wallets and zero‑knowledge proofs. PACCs enable a commitment to a transaction without revealing its content, with a relayer incentivized to include the commitment in the chain and collateral locked to deter non‑execution; the model shifts MEV away from extraction toward censorship, mitigated by price and protocol design choices. The authors provide a full protocol, an on‑chain/off‑chain implementation in Solidity on Ethereum, and benchmarks showing feasible proof generation/verification times and gas costs, while outlining scalable paths via batching and layer‑2 solutions. The work demonstrates that PACCs can enable sealed‑bid auctions, FBAs, RFQs, and MEV‑aware AMMs, potentially reducing MEV across DEXs, liquidations, and AMMs, with the main practical trade‑off being relayer collateral dependency and censorship costs. Overall, PACCs offer a decentralized, private mechanism to realize collateralized commitments that preserve user privacy while addressing MEV, presenting significant implications for DeFi robustness and future cryptographic protocol design.

Abstract

In this work, we introduce the private, anonymous, collateralizable commitments (PACCs) framework. PACCs allow any smart contract wallet holder to collateralize a claim, request, or commitment in general, in a private and anonymous manner. PACCs can prove arbitrarily much or little about the wallet generating the commitment, and/or the transaction which is being committed. We demonstrate that PACCs can be applied to effectively eliminate maximal-extractable value (MEV) in DeFi where it currently occurs, shifting MEV instead to censorship. After describing our protocol with detail, we provide an implementation using the Ethereum blockchain, and whose benchmarks prove how PACCs are completely feasible.
Paper Structure (23 sections, 5 theorems, 2 figures)

This paper contains 23 sections, 5 theorems, 2 figures.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Our Contribution
  3. Organization of the Paper
  4. Related Work
  5. Preliminaries
  6. Zero-Knowledge Proofs
  7. Membership Proofs
  8. Smart Contract Wallets
  9. Relayers
  10. PACCs
  11. Model
  12. PACCs Framework
  13. PACCs Circuit
  14. PACCs Protocol
  15. Full Protocol
  16. ...and 8 more sections

Key Result

Lemma 6.1

For a base PACC transaction $tx$ from a wallet $w$ with $bal(w)>fee$, the Nash Equilibrium for $collateral=0$.

Figures (2)

  • Figure 1: Arithmetic circuit for proving the user's availability to commit.
  • Figure 2: Overview of the protocol steps performed between the user, the PACCs contract, and the DApp, in order to peform an action on the DApp.

Theorems & Definitions (10)

  • Definition 4.1
  • Lemma 6.1
  • proof
  • Lemma 6.2
  • proof
  • Corollary 6.3
  • proof
  • Lemma 6.4
  • proof
  • Corollary 6.5