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Anon Wallet

How Privacy Works

Blockchains are public by design. Every transaction is permanently visible: amounts transferred, the sending address, the receiving address, and the timestamp. This transparency is useful for auditability but terrible for financial privacy.

Anon solves this without compromising on self-custody or compatibility with existing DeFi infrastructure.

What Observers See Without Anon

When you use a standard wallet like MetaMask:

  • Your address is permanently linked to every transaction you sign
  • Anyone who knows your address can see your complete transaction history, current balances, and counterparties
  • Exchanges (who know your real identity from KYC) can trace your on-chain activity
  • Data brokers, analytics firms, and adversarial actors can build a profile of your financial behavior

What Observers See With Anon

When you transact through Anon's shielded pool:

  • On-chain records show the Railgun interaction and public transaction data, including shield and unshield amounts
  • The amount, sender, and recipient inside the pool are hidden by a zero-knowledge proof
  • Multiple users share the pool, making direct links harder to establish; timing, distinctive amounts, and other activity can still create correlations
  • Broadcasters submit transactions on your behalf; this separates the on-chain gas payer from your address, but does not guarantee network-level anonymity

The Three Pillars

Security

Wallet key material is generated locally and encrypted at rest. Authentication uses WebAuthn passkeys with PRF support or Argon2id password hashing. Passkey storage and synchronization depend on the authenticator; do not assume every passkey is device-bound. Keep your recovery phrase private.

Privacy

Zero-knowledge proofs (zk-SNARKs) let you prove you have the right to spend funds in the shielded pool without revealing which funds are yours. See Zero-Knowledge Proofs for a plain-language explanation.

Control

Anon is non-custodial: you control your spending keys. Public transaction details remain visible, and services may receive request metadata and the data needed to provide their service.

How Your Wallet Finds Your Money

On-chain privacy is only half the problem. A shielded wallet also has to work out which encrypted notes in the shared pool are yours — and the naive way to do that is to ask a server, which means handing that server a filter derived from your viewing key. Whatever its logging policy, it now knows exactly what you were looking for.

Anon does not ask. Your wallet downloads the pool's history as fixed, public files that are identical for every user, and decrypts them on your device. These history requests contain no wallet-derived note filter, but servers can still observe IP addresses, requested files, and timing.

Wallet Syncing explains the mechanism and lists, precisely, what each server your wallet talks to can still see.

Limitations

Privacy is not absolute. Some information remains visible:

  • The fact that you deposited into (or withdrew from) the Railgun pool is public
  • Shield and unshield amounts and their public sending or receiving addresses are visible
  • Transaction timing and gas fees paid are observable
  • Your IP address is visible to the servers your wallet fetches data from, and the shape of that traffic hints at how recently you synced — a correctly configured VPN or Tor changes which IP those servers see, with additional trust and traffic-analysis limitations
  • Proof of Innocence checks ask a third-party aggregator about your specific notes; see Wallet Syncing for why this one path is different from the rest

For the strongest privacy, shield funds from a fresh address and avoid patterns that could be used to de-anonymize you (like unique round-number amounts that match a previous deposit).