Rate-Limiting Nullifier

The anonymity property opens up the possibility for spam, which could seriously degrade the user experience and the overall functioning of the application. For example, imagine a chat application where users are anonymous. Now, everyone can write an unlimited number of spam messages, but we don't have the ability to kick this member because the spammer is anonymous.

Moreover, RLN can be useful not only to prevent spam attacks but, in general, to limit users (in anonymous environments) in the number of actions (f.e. to vote or to make a bid).

The RLN construct functionality consists of three parts. These parts should be integrated by the upstream applications, that require anonymity and spam protection. The applications can be centralized or decentralized. For decentralized applications, each user maintains separate storage and compute resources for the application.

Before registering to the application, the user needs to generate a secret key and derive an identity commitment from the secret key using the Poseidon hash function:

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