Tessera pool smart contract sits as privacy layer on public blockchains. Users can deposit to and withdram from the tessera pool. Once a user is inside the tesser pool, they can send private transfer to any other user within or outside the pool. A user can receive transfers within the pool from outside. Users can also use public DeFi and interact with other public smart contracts while the public only learns that some user in tessera did the action.
We call tessera's smart contract, the tessera pool due to the fact that any individual remains private within the pool of tessera users. One of tessera's core objectives is to provide privacy, at scale, on public blockchains with compliance. To achieve compliance, tessera's pool is subdivided into multiple subpools, governed by regulated entities. While all subpools benefit from the sum total of privacy of the entire tessera pool.
The subpool owner manages the compliance of its subpool. Any user can be part of tessera subpool, and thus keep their activities completely private from the public eye, if they are part of a subpool. The subpool owner decides the KYC policy, granularity of information they learn of activities within it, and interoperability with other subpools, among other configuration variables. Tessera, the protocol, guarantees that all activities within a subpool follow the rules configured by the subpool owner.
Tessera is designed for strong data silos both between subpools and the protocol. No-information within the subpool breaches the boundary defined by the subpool owner. Various operating entities defined in the protocol, at no time, receive any information about any subpool and its users. Hence, we refer to tessera as providing banking-grade privacy on public chains.
Tessera is non-custodial. Its users do not endow tessera with any trust assumption beyond the public blockchain. Tessera has no settlement risk, apart from intrinsic settlement risk of the public blockchain.
It's worthy to note that a regulated entity may choose to deploy their own "individual" tessera pool (i.e. pool with only a single subpool). However, in that case, users of the entity will benefit from the anonymity among all users of only the entity.
Note that both documents linked below are under construction.
- Refer to technical.md for more technical specification of tessera.
- Refer to lifecycles.md for description of different transaction lifecycles.
