Private payments

Inside a private payment

A private transfer spends one or more of your notes and creates new ones: one owned by the recipient's key for the amount you are paying, and one owned by you for the change. On-chain, the transaction shows nullifiers going in and commitments coming out, and nothing else.

Recipients discover incoming notes by scanning fresh ciphertexts with their viewing key. No address of theirs appears anywhere in the transaction.

Receiving

To be paid privately you share a shielded address, derived from your keys, instead of your wallet address. In the practice app the recipient is simply another practice account, identified by its wallet address, so you can try the flow with a second wallet.

Proving a payment later

Sometimes you need to show that you paid: an invoice, a dispute, an accountant. Payment receipts are planned for a later release: the sender would produce a receipt that reveals one transfer, its amount and its recipient, and no other note.