Commitment tree

The commitment tree structure for Orchard is identical to Sapling:

• A single global commitment tree of fixed depth 32.
• Note commitments are appended to the tree in-order from the block.
• Valid Orchard anchors correspond to the global tree state at block boundaries (after all commitments from a block have been appended, and before any commitments from the next block have been appended).

The only difference is that we instantiate ${\mathsf{MerkleCRH}}^{\mathsf{Orchard}}$ with Sinsemilla (whereas ${\mathsf{MerkleCRH}}^{\mathsf{Sapling}}$ used a Bowe--Hopwood Pedersen hash).

Uncommitted leaves

The fixed-depth incremental Merkle trees that we use (in Sprout and Sapling, and again in Orchard) require specifying an "empty" or "uncommitted" leaf - a value that will never be appended to the tree as a regular leaf.

• For Sprout (and trees composed of the outputs of bit-twiddling hash functions), we use the all-zeroes array; the probability of a real note having a colliding note commitment is cryptographically negligible.
• For Sapling, where leaves are $u$-coordinates of Jubjub points, we use the value $1$ which is not the $u$-coordinate of any Jubjub point.

Orchard note commitments are the $x$-coordinates of Pallas points; thus we take the same approach as Sapling, using a value that is not the $x$-coordinate of any Pallas point as the uncommitted leaf value. It happens that $0$ is the smallest such value for both Pallas and Vesta, because $0^3+5$ is not a square in either $F_p$ or $F_q$:

sage: p = 0x40000000000000000000000000000000224698fc094cf91b992d30ed00000001
sage: q = 0x40000000000000000000000000000000224698fc0994a8dd8c46eb2100000001
sage: EllipticCurve(GF(p), [0, 5]).count_points() == q
True
sage: EllipticCurve(GF(q), [0, 5]).count_points() == p
True
sage: Mod(5, p).is_square()
False
sage: Mod(5, q).is_square()
False

Considered alternatives

We considered splitting the commitment tree into several sub-trees:

• Bundle tree, that accumulates the commitments within a single bundle (and thus a single transaction).
• Block tree, that accumulates the bundle tree roots within a single block.
• Global tree, that accumulates the block tree roots.

Each of these trees would have had a fixed depth (necessary for being able to create proofs). Chains that integrated Orchard could have decoupled the limits on commitments-per-subtree from higher-layer constraints like block size, by enabling their blocks and transactions to be structured internally as a series of Orchard blocks or txs (e.g. a Zcash block would have contained a Vec<BlockTreeRoot>, that each were appended in-order).

The motivation for considering this change was to improve the lives of light client wallet developers. When a new note is received, the wallet derives its incremental witness from the state of the global tree at the point when the note's commitment is appended; this incremental state then needs to be updated with every subsequent commitment in the block in-order. Wallets can't get help from the server to create these for new notes without leaking the specific note that was received.

We decided that this was too large a change from Sapling, and that it should be possible to improve the Incremental Merkle Tree implementation to work around the efficiency issues without domain-separating the tree.