Glossary

Sealed submissions

Sealed submission

Something submitted now that nobody can read until a set moment: a bid, a vote, a quote, a forecast or an agent’s intent. Peal’s whole job is collecting these and opening them together.

Timed disclosure

Publishing information automatically at a chosen time or block height, without anyone having to decide to release it when the moment comes.

Round

In the Peal API, a moment and everything sealed to it. A round has a deadline (a time or a block height); when it arrives, every seal in the round opens at once. Older endpoints call it a condition.

Seal

One encrypted payload inside a round. Its id is the SHA-256 of its ciphertext, so anyone holding the ciphertext can recompute it.

Guaranteed reveal

A reveal that happens because its condition fired, not because a participant chose to reveal. Nobody can withhold a submission by declining to open it.

Commit-reveal

A two-step scheme: participants post a hash of their submission, then come back later and reveal it. Its weakness is the second step: a participant who sees they are losing can decline to reveal.

Timelock encryption

Encryption that can only be undone after a point in time, either by finishing a slow sequential computation (a timelock puzzle or VDF) or by waiting for a beacon such as drand to publish that round’s key.

The cryptography

Batched threshold encryption (BTE)

Encryption to a committee, where a threshold of its members must cooperate to decrypt, and one decryption opens a whole batch of ciphertexts at once rather than one at a time. Peal uses Commonware’s BTE on the BLS12-381 curve.

Threshold decryption

Decryption that needs a minimum number of key holders. In Peal, any 3 of the 5 operators can open a batch, and any 2 learn nothing.

Committee and operators

The set of key holders that open batches. Each operator holds one share of the key and publishes one decryption share per batch once the condition has fired.

Decryption share

One operator’s contribution to opening a batch. A threshold of valid shares recovers every payload in the batch; each share is checked publicly before it counts.

Distributed key generation (DKG)

A way for a committee to create a shared key without any single party ever holding the whole of it. It removes the need for a trusted dealer, and it is Peal’s next phase.

Trusted dealer ceremony

Setting up a committee by having one party generate the key and hand out shares. That party is a trust assumption; Peal’s current committee was set up this way.

Decoy padding

Filling a batch with decoy ciphertexts that look identical to real ones, so the number of slots does not reveal how many real submissions there were.

Seal proof

Public evidence about a seal after its round opens: its position, the ordering root committed before the reveal, and that the commitment preceded the reveal.

Markets and MEV

Sealed-bid auction

An auction where every bid stays hidden until the close, then all bids open at once. Nobody can watch the leader and outbid by one unit at the last second.

Uniform clearing price

A single price at which every winning order in a batch fills, set from the full book once it opens, so nobody pays more for arriving earlier or later.

Frequent batch auction

A market that clears in short, regular batches rather than continuously. With sealed batches, nobody can see or react to orders within a batch before it clears.

Encrypted mempool

A pool of pending transactions whose contents stay encrypted until their order is fixed, so nobody can read a transaction and place their own in front of it.

MEV (maximal extractable value)

Value someone can capture by reordering, inserting or censoring transactions, usually by reading pending transactions first. Sealing transactions until their order is fixed removes the reading.

Front-running and sandwiching

Trading ahead of a known pending order (front-running), or both before and after it (a sandwich), to profit from the price move it causes.

Intent

A signed statement of what a user or agent wants done and the worst terms they accept, which someone else executes. Sealed until its batch is ordered, it cannot be traded against.

Agents and payments

Agent skill

A set of markdown files that teaches a coding agent how to integrate Peal correctly. One command installs it for Claude Code; any agent can read the same files.

x402

Using HTTP 402 Payment Required as intended: the server quotes a price, the caller pays on chain, then repeats the request with proof. No account and no API key, which suits autonomous agents.

Peal Private Links

Private payment links on a zero-knowledge ledger: a receiver shares a link, a payer proves the payment in their browser, and the amount and the parties stay off the public chain. Sepolia testnet today.

How these fit together: how it works and Peal compared.