Protocol Foundations
Introduction
Public blockchains achieve trust by making every transaction globally observable. This design enables verifiability, but it also introduces a structural privacy failure: the transaction graph itself. On EVM-compatible chains, every transfer, approval, swap, and interaction is permanently recorded and trivially linkable across time. Even with pseudonymous addresses, modern graph analysis reliably reconstructs user behavior, counterparties, balances, and financial history.
Abyss is built to correct this failure without weakening the core security assumptions of public blockchains. The protocol provides transactional unlinkability between senders and receivers under strict cryptographic conditions, while preserving on-chain verifiability, deterministic execution, and non-custodial control. Transactions remain public. What is removed is the ability to infer which transactions belong to the same economic actor.
The core insight behind Abyss is that most privacy failures occur at the asset layer, not the consensus layer. Assets on EVM chains are natively address-bound. Once transferred, their provenance remains intact indefinitely unless explicitly broken. Abyss intervenes precisely at this layer by introducing a single, protocol-level anonymity pool, into which assets are normalized and redistributed using zero-knowledge proofs.
Unlike systems that fragment privacy across multiple pools, denominations, or assets, Abyss concentrates all activity into a unified pool to maximize anonymity set size. Deposits are converted into a single privacy asset, and withdrawals are authorized cryptographically rather than through address-based ownership. This architecture enables one-to-many and many-to-one flows, including arbitrarily many withdrawals from a single deposit, without introducing linkage.
Abyss is not a mixer in the traditional sense. It does not rely on heuristic delays, batching, or trusted intermediaries. Privacy is enforced by zero-knowledge succinct non-interactive arguments of knowledge (ZK-SNARKs). Ownership is proven through possession of secrets and nullifiers, not by control of an externally visible account. The protocol never requires identity, metadata, or off-chain coordination.
The team behind Abyss has built and operated systems at Apple, Goldman Sachs, and Binance, environments where correctness, security, scale, and adversarial conditions are non-negotiable. That experience directly informs Abyss’s design. Building privacy infrastructure is not an academic exercise. It requires an understanding of production systems, financial risk, compliance constraints, and how real markets and users behave under stress. Abyss reflects lessons learned from deploying software that must work correctly the first time, at scale, and under scrutiny.
The objective is not anonymity for its own sake, but restoring optional privacy as a first-class property of asset transfer on public blockchains. Abyss treats privacy as infrastructure, not an application feature, and is designed to compose cleanly with payments, DeFi, trading, and prediction systems without leaking transactional intent or historical linkage.