Published Apr 12, 2026 · By Minto

Gas cost vs transparency: design tradeoffs in Minto commit-reveal runtime

Blind box systems can become prohibitively expensive if every request stores heavy state and runs full settlement on-chain. Minto adopts a hybrid model to reduce user gas while keeping verifiable anchors.

Where gas goes in high-cost designs

1. Per-request storage writes for large structs.
2. On-chain settlement of every outcome path.
3. Verbose events carrying non-essential payloads.

Minto runtime choices

1. Use a lightweight user transaction path with requestOpenLite.
2. Commit entropy at round level instead of per-request entropy records.
3. Apply deterministic off-chain result projection from on-chain commitments.
4. Keep anti-replay controls in contract for request uniqueness and expiry.

Tradeoff boundary

This design is intentionally transparent and replayable, but not equivalent to full VRF trust minimization. Minto documents this boundary publicly and surfaces verification endpoints so users can inspect live behavior directly.