Objective: The paper must introduce the problem that we have addressed by constructing the Blend protocol and the solution (Blend protocol). Therefore, it must have strong theoretical motivation and solid theoretical introduction to the solution (Blend as a framework/family of protocols). It must abstract from “implementation details” and must clearly present the key innovations in as concise manner as possible.

Deliverable: Arxiv publication, approx. 15 pages.

Deadline: End of February 2026

Timeline:

• First week of December: initial outline of the paper ready;
• By the end of January: initial draft of the paper ready;
• By the end of February: publication to Arxiv;

Initial Outline:

1. Abstract
2. Introduction: We focus on a specific use case where we have limited number of senders that do not compound to the anonymity pool, making messaging patters distinguishable. We achieve anonymity at low bandwidth at the cost of the latency.
   1. Problem statement
      1. Why to Blend and not to Mix OR why mixing is not enough (soften tone)
         1. Scarce communication patterns
         2. Consensus self-censoring
         3. Validators privacy (stake hiding)
   2. Contributions
   3. State of the Art
   4. Outline
3. Model and Goals
   1. High level overview
   2. Threat model
      1. GPA
      2. GPA+
   3. Security Goals
      1. Sender-Recipient Third party unobservability
      2. sender online unobservability
      3. sender anonymity
      4. receiver unobservability *(broadcasting case)
      5. receiver anonymity *(broadcasting case)
4. Architecture
5. Protocol (or part of the above)
   1. Abstract Blend
   2. Bare Blend
   3. Covered Blend
   4. Drop Blend
6. Analysis of the security properties
   1. Passive Attack resistance
      1. Message indistinguishability
      2. Blending security
   2. Active Attack resistance
      1. n-1 attack
   3. End-to-end anonymity evaluation (to be adapted)
      1. Delay
      2. number of layers
      3. corruption
      4. network size
      5. bandwidth
7. Evaluation
   1. Setup
   2. Bandwidth
   3. Latency
   4. Scalability
8. Discussion/Future work
9. Conclusion and future work