How privacy works

You keep using your own wallet, and what you do with your money stays private. Everything still runs on a public chain, so coins and actions stay visible, and what Redacted removes is the link between them and your wallet. Your coins join a shared Reserve where every note looks the same, and only a proof made with your own keys can move them.

Your wallet stays yours

Anyone with a wallet can use Redacted, without signing up or showing who they are. You sign one message with the wallet you already use, such as Keplr, MetaMask, Rabby or Trust, and that signature creates the keys of your private account in your browser. The keys never leave your device, and there is no new seed phrase to write down (see Sign-in and Sessions).

Your coins rest in the Reserve contract, and only a proof made with your keys can move them. Nobody else can spend or redirect them, including governance and the core contributors, and withdrawals are always open.

Every deposit is approved by the node network, and each node chooses what it checks before it approves. Only independent nodes decide whether a deposit is sent back, and it only ever goes back to its sender. Bōheki (once, for about 3 days at most) and node votes can pause all new deposits, but a pause applies to everyone at once and never singles anyone out.

When a node uses the online checks, the Ozone instance it asks sees every address the node checks for a deposit or an action, along with the time of the check, and a node that prefers to keep these to itself can rely on the signed copy of the lists or run its own instance.

Everyone's coins meet in the Reserve

When you deposit, your coins become a private note in the Reserve. A note is a sealed entry that only your keys can open, and from the outside all notes look alike, whoever owns them and whatever they hold.

When you use your money, your browser makes a zero-knowledge proof. The proof shows the contract that you own notes in the Reserve worth enough for the action, and it never shows which notes they are. Each note leaves a one-time mark when it is used, so it can never be used twice, and that mark points to no note in particular.

A relayer then carries the action to the chain and pays the network fee, so your wallet signs nothing and appears nowhere next to it. The action could have come from anyone who has the same coin in the Reserve, and that group of possible sources is your crowd, also known as your anonymity set.

What the chain shows and what stays private

The ledger itself stays public, which keeps Redacted auditable, and your privacy comes from the missing link between your wallet and your activity. A disclosure report, coming soon, will let you show your own history to someone you choose, such as an auditor (see Compliance).

How big your crowd is

Your privacy grows with the number of different people whose coins could just as well be yours. When you take out 500 USDC, everyone who put USDC into the Reserve before that moment is part of your crowd. With ten of them, an outsider who guesses is right one time in ten, and with a thousand the guess is right one time in a thousand.

The number of different people in the same coin matters more than how much they hold. Popular coins build a large crowd quickly, and because the note tree never deletes anything, every earlier deposit of the same coin remains a possible source. Each new user adds to the crowd of everyone else, so Redacted grows more private as more people use it.

An outsider can try to narrow a crowd by matching amounts and times, for example a deposit of 1,234 USDC and a withdrawal of exactly 1,234 USDC an hour later. The wait for new money and different amounts on the way out keep your crowd at its full size, and the app helps with both. Upcoming privacy indicators will show how strong your crowd is for each coin, computed in your browser from public chain data.

How to get the strongest privacy

A few habits make a real difference, and the app's defaults are built around them.

• Let funds rest in the Reserve. The longer they rest, the more deposits join around yours and the larger your crowd grows.
• Vary your amounts. If you deposit 1,000 and later move the 200 you need, observers have a much harder time than with an exact round trip. With the node network, the app warns you when a withdrawal matches a recent deposit and offers to split it.
• Use the coins that many people use. A popular coin gives you a large crowd from the start.
• Treat your Spending account as its own persona. It starts with no history, and it stays unconnected to you as long as you don't post its address next to your name.
• Withdraw to a fresh address when you go back to public, instead of straight back to a wallet that is already tied to you.

Why new money waits

With the node network, new money waits about two hours before it can be used privately. The wait protects your privacy in several ways, and it also gives the nodes time to send back money they decide not to accept (see Compliance).

• A waiting deposit can't be used yet, so money is never used minutes after it arrives. That timing link is the easiest one for an observer to spot, and the wait rules it out.
• When several deposits are due together, the nodes admit them in one batch of up to 20 under one new state of the tree, so a note used afterwards could be any of them.
• Money that the nodes send back goes to where it came from and never mixes with yours, and a clean crowd is a better one to hide in.
• Your own money comes back at once when it returns from Spending. That covers what came from your Reserve, every gain your positions make in the share you put in, and payments straight from another Redacted user's Reserve. Money someone else sends to your Spending account waits like a deposit, and in a mixed return your own part still comes back at once. Nodes confirm this (see Returns from Spending), and returns also wait while incident mode or a deposit pause is on.