Introduction

What is Sankofa Engine

Sankofa Engine is a sharded, privacy-preserving financial ledger engine purpose-built for digital assets. It delivers cryptographically auditable transaction processing with zero-knowledge proof capabilities, enabling organizations to operate compliant, high-throughput ledger infrastructure without exposing sensitive financial data.

Traditional ledger systems force a choice between transparency and privacy. Sankofa Engine eliminates that trade-off: every transaction is recorded in a tamper-evident hash chain and signed with a cryptographic receipt, while encrypted balances and ZKP assertions ensure that only authorized parties can observe account state.

Key Capabilities

How It Works

Sankofa Engine processes every transaction through six deterministic stages:

1. Submit — A client sends a transaction request via the REST API. Authentication uses JWT tokens or ECDSA request signing. The API Gateway validates the request schema, enforces RBAC policies, and generates a transaction ID from the caller-supplied idempotency key.

2. Route — The API Gateway computes FNV-1a(account_id) % shard_count to determine the target shard. This deterministic routing requires no cross-shard coordination and ensures all operations for a given account land on the same shard.

3. Process — The assigned Shard Worker receives the transaction via NATS JetStream, reads the in-memory balance cache, validates the transaction (sufficient balance, duplicate check), updates the account balance, and batches the transaction into the current block.

4. Sign — The Shard Worker extends the shard’s SHA-256 hash chain with the new block, signs a receipt using ECDSA P-256, batch-inserts the block into ScyllaDB, publishes the signed receipt to NATS, and acknowledges the original message.

5. Project — The Projection Service subscribes to signed receipts and updates PostgreSQL balance views, maintaining a CQRS read model that supports fast balance queries without touching the ledger directly.

6. Prove — The Compliance Service generates zero-knowledge proofs (proof-of-liabilities, proof-of-provenance, proof-of-compliance) on demand, enabling regulatory reporting and third-party audits without revealing underlying account data.

Deployment Model

Sankofa Engine is managed by Sankofa Labs Inc. The source code is available for enterprise review under a proprietary license. The platform is Kubernetes-native, designed to run on any conformant K8s cluster with standard operators for ScyllaDB, PostgreSQL, and NATS.

A free non-commercial version is planned for early 2027, enabling developers and open-source projects to run the engine in non-production environments.

Technology Stack