Confidential settlement

A market cannot work if every participant publishes its counterparties, sizes and inventory to its competitors. Providers would be front-run on every quote and clients would move the market against themselves with every large trade. Confidentiality is therefore not a product on BATHRON; it is a property the settlement state needs so that markets can be built on it at all.

BATHRON uses Sapling proofs for confidential transfers of M1.

What can be hidden

• amounts and balances in the shielded pool;
• linkage across a shielded transfer — who paid whom, and how much.

What remains verifiable

• consensus verifies conservation without learning the hidden amounts;
• burns, locks and Bitcoin-header proofs remain transparent where auditability requires it;
• the M0 and M1 accounting invariants remain public (see Accounting invariants).

What it does not cover

Shielding hides the M1 side of a settlement, not the whole workflow. Bitcoin edge transactions, timing, network metadata and application behaviour may still reveal information; BATHRON does not claim Monero's anonymity set or a complete privacy guarantee.

In practice, Clearing and Liquidity Providers use the confidential state as back-office infrastructure — inventory moves and OTC sizes stay private — while end users settle in the assets they already hold and are never asked to manage "private cash".

Primitives: shielded transfers (Sapling) · shieldsendmany

See also: Delivery-versus-payment and OTC · Run a wallet