Do confidential transactions produce an UTXO

Question

There must be magical cryptographic reason why CT doesn't create an UTXO. If it did make an UTXO, it'd be trivial to calculate the input + output right?

Answer 1

In Confidential Transactions (as used in Blockstream's Elements and Liquid), there are still identifiable UTXOs.

The only change is that instead of the amount, a homomorphic commitment to the amount is stored. While not technically correct, you could see it as a form of encryption that is compatible with addition and subtraction. So if a+b=c+d then E(a)+E(b)=E(c)+E(d) (where E() is the encryption function). This lets the verifiers still ascertain that the amounts in input and outputs match up.