Research note · Research
Private Intent, Public Settlement
Strategy can stay private until execution while settlement remains public and auditable. This note compares approaches and their trust assumptions.
In markets, the intent is the edge. An agent's planned rebalance, disclosed before execution, is an invitation to be front-run. Yet the settlement itself should remain public and verifiable — that is what makes chain-based finance trustworthy. The question is which techniques can hold the gap between the two.
The design space includes commit-reveal (intent hashes published first, opened after execution), threshold encryption (intent readable only when a quorum agrees conditions are met), confidential compute enclaves (execution in hardware the operator cannot read), and private relay or mempool arrangements. Each carries trust assumptions — in committees, in hardware vendors, in relay operators — and each degrades differently under collusion or compulsion.
We are most interested in the honest accounting of those assumptions rather than in promising any single technique. What still must be disclosed for audit, and at what latency premium, is treated as a first-class design input, not an afterthought.
What this note covers
- Commit-reveal, threshold encryption and confidential compute
- Private relay or private mempool assumptions
- Latency, cost and composability trade-offs
- What still has to be disclosed for audit