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Null Reserves

Shared pools of liquidity that are never attributed to a person.

A Null Reserve is a shared pool of money that nobody owns. Deposits go in, spending rights are issued against what's there, and payments come out. What it never does is keep a list of who owns which part, because that list is exactly what the protocol exists to avoid.

"Unattributed" is stronger than "private"

A private balance still exists. It's just hidden, which means it can be revealed: leaked, subpoenaed, or worked out from patterns. Plenty of things that call themselves private are really just hidden.

An unattributed reserve has nothing to reveal. There's no "person X holds Y" recorded anywhere in the system, so there's nothing to protect, leak, or subpoena.

If you catch yourself asking "but how is my balance protected?", the question doesn't apply here. You don't have one. That takes a while to sink in, and it's the thing everything else depends on.

A reserve keeps the money, all of it pooled together the rules it enforces how much it has already promised It never keeps alice → 4,200 bob → 18,500 carol → 960 no such list exists, anywhere

The missing list is the whole design. A reserve knows how big it is and what it has committed to. It does not know whose anything is, because that record is never written in the first place. Nothing to leak, subpoena, or work out from patterns.

What a reserve keeps track of

  • The money. Everything deposited, pooled together.
  • The rules. What can be spent from it and under what conditions. See Reserve policy.
  • Rights currently outstanding. So it knows how much has already been promised.

Notice what's missing: anything per-person. A reserve knows how big it is and what it's already committed to. It doesn't know whose anything is.

Bigger reserves work better

Rights are issued against the reserve as a whole, not against a particular deposit. So the size of the reserve is what decides how useful it is: a deeper reserve supports more outstanding rights and bigger individual payments.

That's why supplying reserves is rewarded rather than assumed, and it's most of what the token is for.

It also means scale helps here in a way it usually doesn't. Adding depositors adds depth without adding a single attributable position, so a bigger reserve isn't a bigger target.

There can be more than one

Reserves don't all have to work the same way. Different reserves can enforce different rules, which is what makes this usable in situations with genuinely different requirements. A reserve built for one purpose might allow payments another would refuse.

Not decided yet. Who can create a reserve, whether creation is permissioned, and how an app picks which one to use. These are governance and deployment calls rather than properties of the design, so they'll land here once settled.