The "Business Ledger" Behind Transactions: Exploring Publicly Verifiable Rise Mechanisms

In the field of decentralized finance (DeFi), every transaction is recorded on an immutable public ledger, which anyone can verify. We are accustomed to viewing every exchange record on decentralized exchanges, but this information is usually limited to the occurrence of the transaction itself.

For a long time, the attribution of transactions has largely relied on internal systems of projects or centralized backend processing, forming the so-called "growth black box": although the transactions themselves can be verified on-chain, the sources of promotion are usually counted off-chain. This practice is not accidental, but rather due to technical and cost considerations. On mainstream public chains, adding extra identifiers to each transaction significantly increases transaction fees and may also pose security risks, so many projects choose to store their "business ledgers" off-chain.

A certain decentralized trading platform operates based on a self-developed underlying blockchain network, allowing users to engage in perpetual contract trading here. Unlike other platforms, it chooses to make key business data and trading logic publicly available on the chain, achieving comprehensive transparency from financial transactions to rise attribution, making the exchange's "backend" more intuitively presented as a traceable rise map.

Public "Business Ledger": Insights into the rise of sources

The platform's data dashboard resembles a real-time "war room", showcasing not only macro trends but also accurately pinpointing which wallet address, what tools were used, and when the market changes were initiated. This approach involves structuring source information into the protocol path, focusing on two main dimensions:

1. Builder (Order Level): Records the tool used for placing an order in the order parameters. This allows for comparison of transactions, fees, and retention by tool, and facilitates source attribution.

2. Referral (Account Level): Bind the referral relationship on the account side, with discounts and commissions settled on-chain according to the agreement rules. This allows for the verification of new promotions and transactions based on on-chain settlement against official/third-party panels, facilitating budget and ROI assessment.

Trustless mechanism for rise contribution

When "rise attribution" moves from off-chain to on-chain, the entire value chain changes. We can observe this change from three dimensions: rules, settlement, and data:

1. Rules: From "Variable Interpretation" to "Protocol Layer Rules" The key logic is solidified into smart contracts, executed collectively by the network, replacing temporary interpretations with code constraints, enhancing the neutrality and predictability of the rules.

2. Settlement: From "Manual Approval" to "Automated Clearing" Taking Builder (order level) as an example: Users first set the "maximum fee authorization" for the developer address, and subsequent orders carry the builder parameter, with the protocol completing the revenue sharing settlement on-chain without any manual intervention.

3. Data: From "Promotional Report" to "Traceable Ledger" All key actions—placing orders, canceling orders, clearing, applying discounts—are recorded on-chain, and anyone can independently verify in the public ledger, no longer relying on unilateral promotions.

This change has had a direct impact on all parties in the ecosystem:

• For developers and promoters: return to the essence of contribution, automatic settlement based on on-chain contributions, not relying on relationships or offline statistics.
• On project operations and DAO governance: shift from subjective judgment to data consensus, making decisions around unified metrics to reduce discussion costs.
• For ordinary traders: can independently identify effective tools and real contributions, reducing the impact of false information.

The Cost of Transparency and the Boundaries of Privacy

However, pushing transparency to the extreme also brings new risks and challenges:

1. Strategy leakage and Alpha decay: Profit strategies of professional traders and developers can be easily replicated, leading to the rapid failure of strategies.

2. Precise targeting and market manipulation: The intentions of large traders in building positions become evident, which may be maliciously followed or exploited by counterparties for precise strikes.

3. Financial Privacy Spillover: Users' transaction history and profit and loss status are completely public, which may attract security threats.

To address these risks, the industry is exploring verifiable privacy technologies represented by zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP). The goal is to prove to the protocol that a particular contribution was indeed made by a specific promoter or tool without disclosing the identity or strategy details of the trader, thus enabling on-chain settlement based on this proof. This technological path provides direction for achieving the ideal state of "both verifiable and protective," but still faces challenges in terms of cost, latency, and anti-witch-hunt measures, requiring further engineering optimization.

Conclusion: A New Paradigm for Restructuring Business Models

This attempt to put "growth attribution" on-chain extends the DeFi principle of "trustlessness" from the transactional level to the source level, showcasing a new model of protocol-native growth: it completely places the closed loop of "user acquisition - transaction - profit sharing" on-chain, making it both traceable and verifiable, laying the foundation for a fairer incentive mechanism.

However, this design also raises a core question: how to better protect personal strategies and privacy while ensuring verifiability. Only when "traceable ledgers" and "rights to anonymity" can coexist harmoniously can the rise mechanism truly complete the comprehensive migration from off-chain to on-chain. Finding this balance will be one of the key issues in the future development of the DeFi ecosystem.