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Glossary

Commitment Scheme

A cryptographic primitive that lets you commit to a value now and reveal it later, with no way to change the value between commit and reveal.

A commitment scheme has two properties: "hiding" (the commitment reveals nothing about the value) and "binding" (you can't later open the commitment to a different value). The simplest construction is hash(value || nonce).

Commitments underpin many on-chain protocols: sealed-bid auctions, hash-time-locked contracts, randomness beacons, and KZG commitments for blob data. Anywhere you need to publish "I have decided" without yet revealing what, a commitment scheme is the primitive.