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Accounts Registry Tree

Accounts Registry Trees are used by some attesters as a data structure to store their available groups.

Key-Value Merkle tree

A KV Merkle tree is a key-value store enhanced with a merkle tree. The merkle tree stores in its leaves the following data: hash(key, value).

Accounts Tree

An Accounts Tree is a KV Merkle tree where the keys and values are accounts (e.g keys = account identifiers, values = accounts values)
This makes it easy and cheap for a verifier with access to the root of the tree (say a smart contract) to verify that a prover (a user) owns an account in the KV store.
This prover just has to send the merkle proof to the verifier
Accounts tree structure
An Accounts Tree can store a group of accounts.
An example of such group:
  • account identifiers: all addresses that voted in the ENS DAO
  • account values: the number of submitted voted for each address
  • (group identifier): 3
A user (owner of 0x123..def) can easily prove to a smart contract (an attester with access to the root) that they voted 5 times.
They just need to provide the following information:
  • Proof of 0x123..def ownership: signature of a message with their private key
  • 5: the account value
  • merkle proof (data needed for the attester to reconstruct the accounts tree root)
The attester will then just need to:
  • verify the signature
  • compute the leaf = hash(0x123..def,5)
  • Verify the merkle proof (hashing the leaf against the merkle proof elements to check whether it corresponds to the accounts tree root)

Registry tree

The registry tree is another KV merkle tree where the key is an accounts tree root, and the value a specific value linked to the accounts tree (e.g for Hydra-S1 we chose the groupIndex as the accounts tree value)
Registry tree structure
Taking the previous example.
A group of ENS Voters has a group identifier = 3
We can register the previous accounts tree of ENS Voters in the Registry tree with the value 3.
Users will then be able to prove to a verifier (that only has access to the registry tree root) that:
  • They have an account that's part of one of the accounts trees registered
  • The accounts tree they are a part of has the value of 3
=> They will have effectively proved they are part of the group 3!
Registry tree structure

Hydra-S1 Attesters

Hydra-S1 Attester uses this scheme to enable users to prove they have accounts that are part of groups.
The proof of ownership is a bit more complex than signing a message, but the general flow is exactly the same.
The scheme is done in a ZK-SNARK which makes it impossible for anyone to know which account was used to prove that they are part of a group with a specific account!