Your swap will appear here, with every step it goes through.
Spend shielded ZEC anywhere Lightning works.
Get paid over Lightning, straight into the shielded pool.
No transparent addresses on the way through. The Zcash side is a shielded transaction and the Bitcoin side never touches a blockchain, so there is nothing for a chain observer to link.
A Lightning address that lands in the shielded pool
Anyone with a Lightning wallet can pay you@this gateway, and it arrives as shielded ZEC. Payer comments ride along as encrypted memos.
Who sees what
Privacy claims should be checkable. This is the full list.
| Party | Learns | Never learns |
|---|---|---|
| Zcash chain observers | That a shielded transaction happened | Sender, recipient, amount, memo, that Lightning was involved |
| Bitcoin chain observers | Nothing. Lightning payments are off-chain | Everything about the payment |
| Lightning routing nodes | The amount passing through them | Who paid, and who was paid (onion routing) |
| The payee | That Shieldbolt's node paid their invoice | Your Zcash address, your wallet, your balance |
| The lightwalletd server | That the gateway downloads every block | Which outputs are the gateway's. It never asks for a transaction by ID |
| This gateway | The invoice it pays or issues, the ZEC amount, your refund or payout address, your IP unless you use Tor | Your other transactions or balance. Linking data is erased 24 hours after a swap finishes |
The gateway holds funds for the seconds between the two legs, like any swap service. Amounts are capped to keep that exposure small. Run your own: the code is open source.