The Invisibook AMA

Applications & Ecosystem
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The Invisibook Reddit AMA Recap

Invisibook is a privacy-preserving, censorship-resistant, decentralized order book with a purely cryptographic stack.

This Reddit AMA covered how Invisibook relates to CKB, why the team is building a privacy-focused order book instead of an AMM, what role ZK and MPC play in the architecture, how the project thinks about liquidity and launch planning, and what kind of traders the protocol is being designed for.

Useful links:

Disclaimer: This AMA is for informational purposes only. The projects discussed are independent and are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or representative of the Common Knowledge Base Association (CKBA) or any official standard. Invisibook is community and DAO funded. DYOR. Nothing here is financial, legal, or investment advice. Crypto involves significant risk.

TL;DR

  • Invisibook is designed as a privacy-preserving decentralized order book, not an AMM.

  • The team sees Invisibook as a real-world trading system, not just a research proof.

  • CKB L1 is used to protect Invisibook’s consensus and ledger security, while commitment handling and ZK verification happen on the Invisibook chain.

  • Proof of Buying is a core part of the CKB alignment story, with the team arguing that Invisibook activity can help drive demand for CKB.

  • The protocol prioritizes privacy over maximum speed and is aimed at traders with medium- to long-term positions.

  • The team is thinking about liquidity through academic promotion, institutional outreach, and collaboration with other Web3 communities.

  • Testnet planning is underway, while mainnet planning will come later.

  • The team plans to share a launch plan in the second half of the year.

Full AMA Recap

Question 1

“If most operations take place within the Invisibook order book rather than on CKB, how does CKB benefit? And what prevents you from moving the technology to another blockchain later?”

Answer

Invisibook can help CKB capture value.

As the number of Invisibook users increases, transaction fees on Invisibook will rise. Invisibook miners will need to spend more CKB to compete for block production rights (due to Invisibook’s consensus mechanism being proof of buying: https://talk.nervos.org/t/proof-of-buying-layer1-layer2/9752/27). Therefore, the price of CKB will be driven up by the development of Invisibook.

Why not use other L1 tokens for the Invisibook?

  1. Proof of buy is only suitable for Proof-of-Work (PoW) as L1 because the token and its consensus are decoupled in PoW. Large-scale purchases through proof of buy will not threaten the L1 consensus security. In a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) public chain, once you use proof of buy, you objectively become an attacker of the PoS consensus (because you are absorbing staking), and over time, the PoS consensus security will be threatened.

  2. Proof of buy requires a PoW L1 token with programming capabilities, so BTC is not suitable.

  3. CKB’s current price is low enough, which offers a cost advantage for projects using proof of buy for cold starts.

  4. For some personal reasons, the inspiration for proof of buy itself comes from Nervos’ analysis of PoW. Therefore, proof of buy is almost tailor-made for CKB.

Question 2

“What infra or resources within the ecosystem do you think Invisibook needs to collaborate with to maximize its utility?”

Answer

We need to collaborate with privacy-preserving cross-chain bridges, the Fiber Lightning Network (used for proof of buying consensus), Zama (FHE provider), and hardware manufacturers (for accelerating zero-knowledge and homomorphic cryptographic computation).

Question 3

“What happens to privacy under a small/thin book where a single order is easy to de-anonymize by elimination?”

Answer

“Invisibook protects the privacy of a user’s order quantity. Its purpose is to prevent attackers from discovering large orders and launching reverse engineering attacks. In the scenario you described, even if a user places an order and then cancels it, no one can actually probe the order quantity through the cancellation. Furthermore, on-chain assets exist in the form of privacy-preserving UTXOs, making it impossible to trace the user through a single order.”

Question 4

“Are you doing the Poseidon-commitment and MAC verification inside a CKB script, and if so how did cycle cost / script size shake out — or does CKB primarily serve as the settlement/anchoring layer with the heavy MPC living off-chain?”

Answer

In fact, Invisibook is a L2 appchain based on CKB L1, All of the commitment, ZK verifying is on the Invisibook chain, the MPC is offchain.

Invisibook will use proof-of-buying to leverage CKB’s security to protect Invisibook’s consensus and ledger security.

Question 5

“What about the Cell model and CKB-VM (RISC-V) made it the right L1 for the on-chain commitment + verification layer, versus an account-model chain?”

Answer

We don’t use CKB L1 to implement privacy, Invisibook is a L2 appchain based on CKB L1.

We use CKB L1 to protect the consensus and ledger security of our Invisibook chain（https://talk.nervos.org/t/proof-of-buying-layer1-layer2/9752) and it can also increase the value of CKB.

Question 6

“What makes Invisibook “special” compared to other DEX’s, AMM’s ?

Answer

First , it is a privacy decentralized orderbook, not AMM.

Technically, Invisibook is a pure cryptographic implementation that does not rely on any centralized service, TEE, or other trusted third parties. It is just a trustless system.

It preserves price discovery while protecting the privacy of order volume, eliminating the possibility of large-position traders being manipulated in the market, even if attackers use AI. Simultaneously, its matching process is censorship-resistant and cannot be manipulated behind closed doors (many DEXs use operational privileges to implement censorship methods such as MEV to seize user profits).

Existing DEX order book privacy cannot achieve the above points.

Question 7

“Why did you choose Groth16 over other available ZK proof systems?”

Answer

Groth16 is currently used only for the convenience of rapid building; plonk could also be used.

Question 8

“Do you have plans yet for the mainnet setup ceremony, and will it be open to the community?”

Answer

Yes, we will open to the community, CKB community is first. Our weekly report will show the process of our development.

Testnet planning is underway; mainnet planning will be slightly slower.

Question 9

“Will trading and cross-chain fees on Invisibook be low enough to compete with other DEXs and bridges for liquidity?”

Answer

yeah, as it is a L2 appchain, and it is not EVM compatible, all the on-chain operations are native (not in any VM) and the gas cost of them will be re-defined.

For example, in other blockchain VMs, a behavior of order matching may call many opcodes to complete (such as LT/GT/EQ/SWAP1/DUP1) and each opcode need one gas cost, all of these gas cost may be expensive totally. But in Invisibook, there are no opcodes, the matching is a native behavior in the chain and it just cost once.

Question 10

“Will Invisibook be compatible with standard CKB token assets such as SUDT and XUDT?”

Answer

Of course~

Question 11

“What are you considering now to attract liquidity as the protocol matures?”

Answer

We can’t give a specific answer to this question at this stage; we can only say that there are roughly 3 directions：

  1. Academic and Community: We plan to publish our Invisibook paper at top academic conferences and leverage this opportunity for academic promotion on other well-known financial technology forums (given the strong core competitiveness of our product).
  2. Engage with institutional investors and traders to encourage trading institutions that need protection against reverse engineering attacks to use our product.
  3. Collaborate with other Web3 communities for promotion.

Question 12

“Who is helping with the development and white paper?”

Answer

Besides myself, there are cryptography PhDs who have published papers at the Big Four.

XinRan Chen

github: https://github.com/Lawliet-Chan

  • The author of EIP-8099

  • The contributor of PSE zkevm-circuits

  • ex Reddio Tech leader

Tianyi Liu

Question 14

“Do you see Invisibook primarily as a research/scientific proof, or do you have concrete plans to deploy and operate it as a real-world trading system?”

Answer

Certainly real-world trading system.

As AI continues to develop, algorithms like iceberg order processing will become ineffective against it. Meanwhile, dark pools sacrifice price discovery efficiency. To address both of these issues, we created Invisibook.

Question 15

“How high can its tps be? How does its trading speed and experience compare with hyperliquid”

Answer

Theoretically, it could exceed 1000, depending on the speed of zk verify, which we currently achieve in milliseconds during stress testing.

Our DEX prioritizes privacy, not transaction speed. We target traders with medium- to long-term positions. Our system aims to help traders conceal their trading activity, preventing them from being targeted by contrarian strategies in lit markets. Furthermore, we do not have a third party, unlike other DEXs that have a matching center or TEE.

Question 16

“When do you plan to launch?”

Answer

Just developing and writing the paper now, we are preparing to submit to the big four conferences in information security.

The white paper is : https://invisibook-lab.github.io/post/invisibook_white_paper/

We will provide the launch plan in the second half of the year.

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