Privacy & Confidential Execution
Why Privacy Matters for Portfolio Managers
DeFi is transparent by default, which supports auditability but can limit how portfolio managers protect proprietary allocation logic.
Vault management on public blockchains is a viable business model, but its long-term viability can be constrained when real-time portfolio composition and trading behavior are visible to anyone. Vault tokenization standards commonly expose holdings and rebalance activity. Observers can monitor, reverse-engineer, and replicate strategies without bearing the associated research and execution costs.
Without confidentiality options, managers who wish to avoid liquidity fragmentation face a trade-off between:
- Sharing allocation moves and risking loss of edge, or
- Operating off-chain, which reduces onchain auditability and composability.
For professional portfolio management to scale onchain, confidentiality is treated as a first-class primitive alongside composability and security.
HPKE-Sealed Encrypted Vaults
Managers can create either a transparent or a private (encrypted) vault.
Encrypted vaults store strategist intents and portfolio state as opaque ciphertexts sealed with Orion's HPKE profile.
| Payload | HPKE info label | Onchain surface |
|---|---|---|
| Target allocation (intent) | ORION_INTENT_V1 | Stored as ciphertext; submit emits ConfidentialOrderSubmitted |
| Holdings (portfolio) | ORION_PORTFOLIO_V1 | Stored as ciphertext; epoch updates emit ConfidentialVaultStateUpdated |
Sealing happens offchain (app or SDK) before submitIntent. The vault stores the ciphertext; it does not accept plaintext allocation vectors for encrypted vaults.
Public vs private surfaces
Still public on encrypted vaults:
- Performance: TVL (
totalAssets), share price, high-water mark - Deposit and redeem request activity
- Vault configuration (fees, strategist, access control)
Sealed (not publicly readable as plaintext):
- Allocation weights in the intent
- Per-asset holdings in the portfolio
Transparent vaults continue to emit plaintext OrderSubmitted and VaultStateUpdated events, including assets, weights, and shares. Encrypted vaults instead emit the confidential variants, without revealing those arrays. This keeps allocation details hidden from public observers between epochs. Trade execution continues to run through Orion's asynchronous orchestrator and adapters, while batching and netting help reduce the frontrunning surface.