Privacy is normal

It's how money has worked for most people, for most of history. Crypto made it public by default. Zephyr makes it private again.

What a public ledger shows

Would you accept this from a bank?

A bank that published your balance, every payment you made and every payment you received, for anyone to read, forever. On most blockchains, that's the default.

Pay someone in USDT once and they can see what's in your wallet, where your income comes from and where it goes next. So can an employer, a landlord, a competitor, or anyone who's curious. And their next payment shows you theirs.

What the world sees

The same payment, on a public ledger and on Zephyr

Seen by

Illustration

A USDT transferOn a public ledgerSame for everyone

From
0x8c2f…19d4
To
0x3be7…a07c
Amount
2,500 USDT
Sender's balance
18,240 USDT

Tether can freeze this address

Anyone can read both addresses, the amount, the balance and every past payment.

A ZSD transferOn Zephyr

From
Hidden
To
Hidden
Amount
Hidden
Sender's balance
Hidden

Nobody can freeze it

They can see a transfer happened. Not who sent it, who got it, or how much.

Transfers hide sender, receiver and amount; balances are private. Where privacy is optional, the few who use it stand out. On Zephyr everyone is private, so using it says nothing about you.Made-up addresses and amounts.

A safety issue

Visible wealth is a target

It isn't only awkward. A wallet that can be tied to a name is a map to someone's savings, and crypto holders have been threatened, and robbed at home, after their holdings were traced on-chain. Privacy isn't secrecy.
It's keeping your door closed.

What digital cash was meant to be

Untraceable from the start

Cash never worked this way, and digital cash was never meant to. The first designs for it, in the early 1980s, were built to keep payments untraceable. A decade later the cypherpunks put it plainly:

“Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age.”
Eric Hughes, A Cypherpunk's Manifesto, 1993

Most stablecoins are the opposite: digital dollars whose every balance and payment is open to companies, chain analysts and strangers. ZSD is a digital dollar that stays private, like cash.

On Zephyr

Private by default, open when you choose

Zephyr is built on Monero's privacy technology, with nothing to switch on. Ring signatures hide who sent a payment, stealth addresses hide who received it, and confidential amounts hide how much. Balances are private. Where privacy is optional, the few who use it stand out. On Zephyr everyone is private.

When you do want to show something, to an accountant, an auditor or a tax office, the wallet can prove it without opening everything:

  • A view key

    Lets someone you choose, an accountant say, see the payments coming into your wallet. They can look, but they can't spend.

    viewkey

  • A payment proof

    Proves that one payment went to one address, for one amount, and nothing else about your wallet.

    get_tx_proof

  • A reserve proof

    Proves you hold at least a given balance, without showing where it came from or where it goes.

    get_reserve_proof

These come from Monero and work in the Zephyr command-line wallet. Exchanges still see what you deposit with them, as with any coin.

Privacy isn't something to explain away. It's how money should work.

Ready to hold private dollars?

Buy ZEPH first. Convert ZEPH to ZSD in the wallet, then stake it as ZYS. It earns from the next block.

Open the web wallet Step by step