Public blockchains are designed to store the information in them forever. Their transparency has many advantages over private and/or centralized databases and ledgers. However, such systems cannot be selfsufficient without the tools for private transactions and storage of value. Indeed, users will inevitably seek such tools elsewhere whenever they need them.

ENCOINS Core consists of the Encrypted Coins Protocol, i.e., the rules of minting and burning of encrypted coins and the software components for interaction with it.

In the Encrypted Coins Protocol, each token (encrypted coin) has the same minting policy but aunique token name. In other words, each encrypted coin is an NFT. Token names contain information about the redeeming ADA value of encrypted coins. As the name suggests, this information is encrypted: it is only known to the ”owner” of a particular coin. We will refer to the private information used to generate an encrypted coin as its minting key. Each minting key consists of the redeeming ADA value and a big randomly generated number (nonce).