We are observing a trend towards decentralization, reflected in technologies such as blockchains and distributed ledgers. These enable currencies without banks, community-based platforms without commercial actors, and many more. Central to all such systems is their transparency, allowing anyone to verify the system state, which makes trust in central parties obsolete. However, transparency conflicts with protection of user privacy (meanwhile even legally enforced by GDPR) and current systems cause huge environmental damage.

The goal of COnFIDE is to use cryptography to reconcile public verifiability with privacy in distributed ledgers, and to improve efficiency and sustainability of decentralized systems, avoiding wasting energy (as for mining Bitcoins) and storage (as for massive duplication of obsolete transaction data).