devcon8 / handling private state bloat pruning nullifiers and the privacy scalability trade off
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Handling Private State Bloat: Pruning Nullifiers and the Privacy-Scalability Trade-Off
Duration: NaN:NaN:NaN
Speaker: Preston Vander Vos
Type: Talk
Expertise: No prior knowledge
Event: Devcon
Date: Nov 2026
Privacy-preserving applications like shielded pools, mixers, and anonymous voting face a fundamental scalability crisis: preventing double-spending requires maintaining a global set of spent-tags (nullifiers) forever. Because nodes cannot distinguish between lost credentials and unspent ones, state growth is monotonic and unbounded.
This talk introduces a protocol-agnostic paired-partitioning framework that resolves this tension. By binding credentials and spent-tags into fixed-size partitions derived from consensus ordering, we prove that once a partition is fully spent, its entire state becomes provably redundant and can be safely pruned down to a single bit. Attendees will explore the fundamental trade-off between partition size and anonymity set size, see how this mechanism retrofits both SNARK- and ring-signature-based systems without new cryptographic assumptions, and learn how to bound state growth for the next generation of private applications.
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