#dusk $DUSK @Dusk
Zedger’s SMST: Maybe Privacy for Securities Needs an Accounting System First
I’ve been looking at Zedger from a slightly different angle. Most privacy models ask how to hide an account or transaction. Securities have another problem: ownership is not just a number. It changes by time, transfer rights, voting rights, dividends, and approval status.
That is why the Sparse Merkle-Segment Trie caught my attention. SMST combines a Sparse Merkle Tree with a Segment Tree, letting Zedger commit to account state while keeping different balance categories inside the structure. The design can track maximum, transferable, voting, and dividend-eligible balances without putting the entire account history on public display.
I’ve seen other privacy account models, such as BlockMaze, focus heavily on hiding balances and sender-recipient relationships with zk-SNARKs. That is useful for private payments, but corporate securities create a different data problem. You often need to prove that a transfer is allowed, not simply prove that value moved.
This is where Zedger feels more deliberate to me. Its whitelist tree and account memory structure are tied to the state machine, so compliance is not an external dashboard checking transactions after the fact.
I’m still cautious about the complexity. Every extra state field and proof rule adds engineering and verification overhead.
But the interesting question is not whether SMST hides balances. It is whether a cryptographic account model can preserve the messy realities of securities ownership without turning the ledger into a public shareholder database.
Zedger’s SMST: Maybe Privacy for Securities Needs an Accounting System First
I’ve been looking at Zedger from a slightly different angle. Most privacy models ask how to hide an account or transaction. Securities have another problem: ownership is not just a number. It changes by time, transfer rights, voting rights, dividends, and approval status.
That is why the Sparse Merkle-Segment Trie caught my attention. SMST combines a Sparse Merkle Tree with a Segment Tree, letting Zedger commit to account state while keeping different balance categories inside the structure. The design can track maximum, transferable, voting, and dividend-eligible balances without putting the entire account history on public display.
I’ve seen other privacy account models, such as BlockMaze, focus heavily on hiding balances and sender-recipient relationships with zk-SNARKs. That is useful for private payments, but corporate securities create a different data problem. You often need to prove that a transfer is allowed, not simply prove that value moved.
This is where Zedger feels more deliberate to me. Its whitelist tree and account memory structure are tied to the state machine, so compliance is not an external dashboard checking transactions after the fact.
I’m still cautious about the complexity. Every extra state field and proof rule adds engineering and verification overhead.
But the interesting question is not whether SMST hides balances. It is whether a cryptographic account model can preserve the messy realities of securities ownership without turning the ledger into a public shareholder database.