State & Notes

A SEAL private balance is represented by note openings held by its owner, with commitments recorded in the pool's public append-only forest. A note represents shares of one registered asset rather than a public ERC-20 balance associated with a user address.

Commitments and nullifiers

Ordinary notes bind asset identity, value, ownership and private randomness. Pending payments add recipient and refund authority. Spending publishes a nullifier, preventing a second spend without publishing the note opening.

Recipient claim and sender reclaim share a nullifier; after the seven-day reclaim delay, whichever valid spend confirms first wins. Commitments remain onchain after spending. The specification defines exact commitments, keys and domains.

Forest and transitions

The commitment forest has depth 32 per epoch. Batch insertion reserves output capacity before writing. Old roots remain usable when an epoch rolls over. Each input proves membership independently.

A proof consumes at most eight notes across assets and epochs. Per-asset conservation prohibits paying one token's obligation with another token's shares. Settlement and private transfer move ownership without moving Aave backing. Swaps and withdrawals perform public asset execution, with authorized change returning to private notes.

Aave yield changes the underlying redemption value of shares without rewriting notes. Fee accounting is specified separately in Protocol Fee Policy and the specification.

Account records and durability

Private openings, recovery records, history and controller keys are encrypted offchain. Public hashes cannot reconstruct deleted records. Confirmed receipts and canonical events establish execution; cached balances and UI history do not authorize spending.

Account State explains reconciliation, interrupted actions, chain reorganization and multi-device behavior. Account History defines immutable graph revisions, validation and merge behavior. Transfer Delivery explains transport and file fallback. The user restore procedure is Backup & Recovery.

Margin state

Funding consumes SEAL notes with the signed action context. Aave tracks collateral and variable debt by public margin-account address. The fresh private controller key lives in the encrypted account file. A successful private settlement creates ordinary notes for returned assets; publicly held pending proceeds are not hidden notes.

There is no private position-state commitment or additional margin circuit. See Margin Architecture.