Why Redacted

Bitcoin was built so that nobody needs a bank or anyone's permission to hold and move money. It got there by making its ledger public, which lets anyone check that the rules are followed, but the same ledger shows every wallet, every balance and every transaction to anyone, permanently. In 2008 there was no other way to get a network of strangers to agree on a ledger without trusting someone.

There is another way now. Years of research have produced zero-knowledge proofs that let you prove you own funds and have authorized an action without revealing anything else, so the trade-off Bitcoin had to accept no longer has to apply. Redacted is built on that, and on growing evidence that a public ledger is a practical safety problem as well as a philosophical one.

What happens when your balance is public

In 2020, Ledger's customer database was breached and published. Names, phone numbers and home addresses of 272,000 hardware wallet owners were posted on a hacking forum and could be cross-referenced with on-chain balances. Thousands of people suddenly had their home address attached to their on-chain balance, and the extortion emails started straight away. The breach never touched a private key.

In January 2025, Ledger co-founder David Balland was abducted from his home in France together with his wife. His captors severed one of his fingers and demanded 100 BTC. The attackers knew who he was, where he lived and what he was worth, and special forces rescued him.

In the UK, a crypto holder was targeted in a violent home invasion worth £4.3M. Investigators confirmed that the attackers had cross-referenced leaked data with on-chain holdings, so they checked the balance first and then knocked on the door.

The "$5 wrench attack" needs no exploit at all. Anyone can look up a public wallet balance, so a bad actor with five dollars of hardware and no technical skill can find out what you hold and decide whether a visit is worth their while.

The pattern

These cases follow the same steps:

1. An on-chain balance is visible.
2. An identity gets linked to it through a breach, a purchase record, a KYC leak or a social post.
3. Someone selects a target.

In traditional banking nobody can look up your account balance from a public URL, while in DeFi anyone can. That gap between financial access and financial exposure is the problem Redacted addresses.

How Redacted changes that

Redacted breaks the chain at the first step. Your funds move into a shared private Reserve, and from there your DeFi activity runs from a private account that observers can't connect to your public wallet. You prove ownership with zero-knowledge proofs instead of your address, so the balance lookup that starts those stories comes up empty.

The interface is the flow you already know. You choose an asset, review and confirm, while the proofs and relaying happen underneath, and you keep full DeFi access and native assets with a single sign-in.

Open to everyone

Redacted is permissionless. There is no sign-up, no KYC and no identity check, so anyone with a wallet can use it, and nobody needs anyone's approval to withdraw. The rules are public and the same for everyone, and independent nodes approve deposits, each node choosing its own checks.

New money waits about two hours before it can be used privately, so a deposit can't be matched to what you do with it a few minutes later, and the nodes can use that time to send back money they decide not to accept. Only independent nodes decide whether a deposit is sent back, and it only ever goes back to its sender. The core contributors, the DAO and Bōheki can't turn away or send back anyone's money, and no vote or switch applies to withdrawals. 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.