Privacy should be a foundational component of decentralized services, making them as secure and trustworthy as centralized platforms — if not more so. In traditional systems, privacy is typically managed by trusted intermediaries. In web3, the challenge is ensuring privacy at the protocol level without compromising transparency and trustlessness.
Users expect protection for sensitive transaction data, including transfer amounts, transaction timing, and smart contract interactions. They otherwise face risks such as targeted surveillance, data mining, or direct threats like MEV attacks, where bad actors can manipulate transactions. By preventing front-running and similar forms of manipulation, MEV protection ensures that transactions are processed fairly and efficiently.
But the importance of privacy goes beyond protecting transactions in the memory pool (mempool), where pending transactions are temporarily stored. Communicating just the final state change to the settlement layer minimizes data exposure, preventing third parties from mining insights into user behavior, strategic operations, or financial flows. Execution triggers and contract interactions stay confidential. This ensures operational integrity by reducing the attack surface for future manipulation, and strengthens overall trust in decentralized platforms by safeguarding the privacy of their users.
Ava Protocol’s event-driven execution model enables autonomous super-transactions that are designed to be private and composable. By leveraging Phala Network’s confidential virtual machines (CVMs) as trusted execution environments, Ava Protocol is being built to maintain privacy throughout the automation. Only the final state change — e.g., a token transfer or smart contract execution — is communicated to Ethereum or other public blockchains.
Safeguarding Transaction Privacy
Here’s how Ava Protocol and Phala protect sensitive transaction details:
Trusted Execution Environment: Ava Protocol bundles the transaction logic in an automation module and deploys it to Phala’s CVM. This creates a trusted execution environment (TEE) where all of the logic — contract interactions, triggers, amounts, etc. — is processed privately. The TEE ensures that no sensitive details are exposed or visible on-chain.
Remote Attestation for Integrity: Once the automation module is deployed within the TEE, Phala generates a Remote Attestation report to guarantee that the code is running inside an authentic, secure environment. Users can verify this report before any transactions are executed, reinforcing trust without exposing sensitive information.
Privacy-Preserving Execution: When the preset conditions are met (e.g., a price threshold for a token swap), the automaton module triggers the corresponding transaction. All transaction details, including amounts, recipients, and contract interactions, are processed inside the TEE, which relays the final state change to the blockchain.
MEV Protection: Ava Protocol integrates Flashbots Protect to safeguard transactions against MEV-related manipulation, including front-running. It enables private transaction submission directly to miners or validators, bypassing the public mempool. Keeping transactions confidential during block-building helps preserve the integrity of autonomous super-transactions.
Privacy as a Pillar
Decentralized technologies can only realize their potential to empower individuals and create more equitable digital platforms by prioritizing privacy as a core principle. Leveraging trusted execution environments and MEV safeguards, Ava Protocol is focused on protecting its users from exploitation and unnecessary exposure.
Whether it’s protecting large DeFi operations from predatory trading tactics or giving you greater control over your financial sovereignty, Ava Protocol sets a standard for how transaction automation can be secure, efficient, and private.
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