Proof & Relayer Infrastructure
Provers generate Groth16 witnesses and proofs. Relayers submit shielded transactions on behalf of users so that gas funding, address usage, and timing patterns cannot be correlated. Together they form the off-chain infrastructure that underpins every private transaction.
Prover Workers
A shielded transfer takes approximately 2—4 secondsof prover time on modern consumer hardware. Users who cannot provision a proving worker — mobile wallets, thin clients, hardware wallets — delegate proof generation to a prover relay. Delegation never reveals private inputs: the user encrypts witness data under the prover's public key, or submits only the subset of circuit inputs that the prover requires.
Proving Key Management
Workers load circuit-specific proving keys produced during the Powers-of-Tau ceremony.
Horizontal Scale
Proof jobs are stateless; workers scale horizontally with demand.
Fee Bidding
Prover relayers quote a $DNET fee; clients select the cheapest-reliable provider.
Transaction Relayers
On-chain submission of a shielded transaction requires paying L2 gas in ETH (or equivalent gas token) from a funded account. If users submit their own transactions, their gas-funding address can be linked back to them.
Relayers solve this: the user passes the signed, proof-carrying transaction to a relayer, and the relayer pays gas from its own pool — charging a $DNET fee from the shielded note itself. The user's L1 or L2 gas address is never exposed.
Gas Abstraction
The user never holds ETH on the DarkNet L2 to transact — the shielded note pays the relayer in $DNET.
Timing Obfuscation
Relayer batching and delay windows reduce timing correlation between user intent and on-chain confirmation.
Operator Incentives
Operators bond $DNET as collateral. They earn protocol fees for proof generation and relay service. A portion of every gas fee collected in $DNET is directed to the staker pool, so operators share in network fee revenue proportional to their stake.
- Uptime SLA and liveness are enforced by slashing conditions governed by $DNET holders.
- Deflationary burn: 20% of gas fees paid in $DNET are sent to the zero address permanently.
- Batch submission frequency is a governance-set parameter.
Liveness Risk
Relayer/Prover Dependence
Privacy guarantees depend on a functional relayer and prover network. A coordinated failure or censorship attack could impair liveness. Already-committed funds remain secure — any user can always withdraw directly from the shielded pool using their spending key, without relying on relayers.