Cryptographically Blinding the Mempool: A Systematic Review of Zero-Knowledge Based Architectures and Commit-Reveal Scheme in Decentralized Exchanges (DEXs)

Abstract

Decentralized exchanges (DEXs) have emerged as a foundational component of blockchain-based financial systems, enabling trustless asset trading without centralized intermediaries. However, the transparency of public mempools introduces significant vulnerabilities, including front-running, sandwich attacks, transaction reordering, and broader information asymmetry. In response, Cryptographic mechanisms such as Zero Knowledge (ZK) based architectures and commit reveal schemes are increasingly proposed as a solution to these vulnerabilities. This research systematically reviews the structural transparency paradox and cryptographic architectures in Decentralized Exchange based Automated Market Makers (DEX-AMM), evaluate their effectiveness in mitigating Maximal Extractable Values (MEVs), analyze computational complexity trade-offs including proof generation/verification costs, gas overhead, latency, and throughput, and identify why commit-reveal may offer superior practical viability despite zk-proofs' stronger theoretical privacy guarantees. A comprehensive search was conducted across arXiv, IEEE Xplore, ACM Digital Library, Scopus, Web of Science, Google Scholar including grey literatures for studies published between 2021 to 2026. Findings indicate that ZK-based approaches provide strong cryptographic privacy guarantees but often incur computational overhead and integration complexity, zk-rollups provide strong validity guarantees through cryptographic proofs, but their practical security depends heavily on the sequencer layer used by ( zkSync, StarkEx, and Loopring) which is responsible for transaction ordering, which can censor, delay, reorder transactions or cause failure of execution, while Commit-reveal schemes may be superior for real-world DEXs due to their constant time hash-based complexity (O(1)), lower gas costs, sub-second latency, and simpler implementation, despite requiring two-transaction UX friction, which can be mitigated through wallet automation. The computational efficiency advantage of commit-reveal becomes critical as DEX transaction complexity increases, where zk-circuit depth grows exponentially. Future research should prioritize optimizing zk-circuit efficiency, developing zk-commit-reveal hybrids system that balance cryptographic strength with computational practicality, and advancing hash-based commit-reveal schemes with UX improvements. DEX developers should prioritize commit-reveal for latency-sensitive applications and zk-proofs only when strongest cryptographic privacy is mandatory.