Privacy and performance in the blockchain world seem to never be able to be achieved simultaneously—privacy requires sacrificing speed, and pursuing performance often exposes data. The Daylight protocol changes this situation; it is a revolutionary zero-knowledge framework that enables true full-chain privacy on Layer 1 public blockchains while maintaining sufficient performance and low costs.

How does the underlying technology achieve this? The core is an optimized improvement of zk-SNARKs. In simple terms, SNARKs allow you to prove the correctness of a computation with a very small proof (a few hundred bytes) and fixed verification time, without revealing the original data. The project adopts Groth16 as the base variant but integrates two schemes: Bulletproofs and BLS. Bulletproofs are used for range proofs (proving that a certain amount is between 0 and 2^64 without revealing the specific value), with the advantage of not requiring trusted setup. BLS signatures can merge multiple signatures into one, significantly reducing on-chain data volume.

Architecturally, it is divided into three layers: the commitment layer is responsible for storing encrypted states; the proof layer generates and verifies zero-knowledge proofs; the consensus layer integrates proof-of-stake mechanisms with privacy logic. During transaction execution, users submit encrypted transactions, which nodes process within the privacy domain, generate proofs, and broadcast them. Validators only need to verify the proof's validity and update the state commitments. Throughout the entire process, no plaintext data is recorded on-chain, fundamentally preventing data from being exposed.