Privacy-preserving cryptocurrencies have been shaped by two foundational but philosophically distinct approaches. On one side sits MimbleWimble — proposed in 2016 under the Tom Elvis Jedusor pseudonym — which replaces public addresses with Pedersen commitments and relies on interactive, two-party transaction construction. On the other sits CryptoNote, the protocol family that powers Monero and its derivatives through ring signatures, RingCT, Bulletproofs, and stealth addresses, all wrapped in a strictly non-interactive sender model.
These two traditions rarely intersect, but the MimbleWimble ecosystem produced one idea with broader applicability: the slate. A slate is a portable, self-contained transaction package that can travel out-of-band — over HTTP, USB, QR code, or carrier pigeon — and be processed asynchronously by the receiver before final network broadcast. In Grin, slates exist because the protocol requires interactive collaboration. But the architectural pattern itself is transport-agnostic.
The Incognito L1 project, a Monero-forked Proof-of-Work cryptocurrency, makes a sharp observation: the slate concept is orthogonal to the underlying cryptographic mechanism. A ring-signature-based system has no inherent need for slates — a sender can construct and broadcast a transaction without any receiver cooperation — but it still suffers from a rigid workflow. The standard Monero transfer command creates and broadcasts atomically. There is no opportunity to review the constructed transaction offline, no way for the recipient to inspect incoming funds before they hit the chain, and no path to create transactions on an air-gapped machine for transport to a connected node.
