Fund your private account
What is the level of privacy?
Summary
When you fund your private account, the asset type, amount, and your public account address are visible. However, there is no public link to your private account. In short, no one will know anything about your private account balance or activity (including us). Your private Nyx account is an account on the Aztec blockchain governed by your Ethereum account. Aztec natively supports private assets and actions, which we use to power the privacy of your Nyx account. If you wish to review the technical details of Aztec, see their docs on private state and private transactions.How to best maintain your privacy
While there will not be a link between your public and your private accounts, there will be a public record on Ethereum that your public account sent assets into Nyx. So, for your Nyx public account, use an Ethereum account whose history you don’t mind being connected to this action. Also consider the fact that if you transfer, for example,0.123456789 WETH from your public account into your private account and a Nyx relayer immediately deposits the same amount of 0.123456789 WETH into an Aave Ethereum vault, or sends that amount to an Ethereum address, external parties may suspect that your public account is connected to the activity due to the asset type and amount matching and the timing being so close. To obfuscate the link between transferring assets to your private account and taking actions on Ethereum with it, consider taking actions with amounts that don’t match your recent deposit amounts and also waiting a while between depositing and acting.
Transaction example
Step 1. Ethereum transaction to fund private account When you fund your private account, there is an initial Ethereum transaction where your Ethereum address will be publicly visible as the sender of a transaction sending assets to our smart contract. The asset type and amount are also publicly visible. To keep your private account private, its address is not included in the funding transaction. Therefore, there is no public link between your public and private accounts. As a result, no one can see what assets your private account is being sent - only that some Nyx private account is being sent the assets - and so cannot infer your private balance. In the example transaction below, you can see that the associated private account address (0x0673dbe45dfc756d96082a03b754419edce2ff9ed4bf652e2bc84ccba2615415 on the Aztec blockchain) is not shown anywhere. We are comfortable sharing both the public and private account addresses of this example transaction because the Ethereum address is one of our testing accounts and because revealing your private address does not leak your private balance or detailed private transaction history. It does, however, leak the count of the number of unique addresses that have initiated a transfer of assets to you at least once, but not which addresses, how many times they sent, or what they sent (learn more).
Explorer link. The associated Nyx private account address - 0x0673dbe45dfc756d96082a03b754419edce2ff9ed4bf652e2bc84ccba2615415 on the Aztec blockchain - is not revealed.
Diagram
With the use of a secret claim code, there is no need to include your private address in the public Ethereum funding transaction. As a result, there is no link between your public account and your private account.
Claim assets coming into your private account
What is the level of privacy?
Summary
When you claim assets into your private account, there is a private transaction on Aztec where you provide the claim secret. Our app automatically stores the secret in your account data - which is encrypted by your passkey and which we cannot read - and then includes the claim secret in the claim transaction for your convenience. Your private address is not included in the transaction. The asset type and amount are visible onchain because the Nyx smart contract for the asset type is involved. So, what is publicly visible is that an unknown Nyx user claimed the given amount of the asset. In short, no one will know anything about your private account balance or activity (including us).Transaction Example
There is no recipient information shown publicly as you can see with this example transaction. The gas fee is paid by the Nyx JuiceBar smart contract and the initiating address is the Nyx Bridged USDC smart contract (since this transaction is for claiming USDC). So, what can be seen is that an unknown Nyx user claimed the given amount of USDC.
Explorer link. The associated Nyx private account address - 0x0673dbe45dfc756d96082a03b754419edce2ff9ed4bf652e2bc84ccba2615415 on the Aztec blockchain - is not revealed.
Common Questions
Why do I have to claim the assets/vault shares?
To protect your privacy. If your private account address was included in a transaction on Ethereum, it would be publicly linked to the actions and other account(s) involved in that transaction. A claim secret is used to prevent this linkage. Transactions coming into your private account include a claim secret when they’re created. A hashed value that can only be created with the secret is included in the transaction. You present the secret when claiming the assets, and once it is verified against the hashed value, the assets are released to your private account. For your convenience, our app automatically stores your unused claim secrets so you don’t need to remember them. To ensure that only you have control and visibility of your assets, we end-to-end encrypt this data and it can only be decrypted with your passkey, which we do not control. So, we cannot see (and thus cannot use) any of your claim secrets.What if I don’t claim them right away?
Don’t worry. Instead of sitting in your private account they sit in a smart contract, waiting on you to claim them the next time you use Nyx. Since you are the only one who can claim them, as only you know the claim secret (see question right above), no one else will claim them.What if I deposit to Aave but don’t claim immediately - am I earning interest?
Supported Assets: Mainnet
Supported assets and Earn vaults
Nyx supports the following assets and Earn vaults. We plan to support additional assets and earn vaults over time.
Getting WETH: one easy way is to wrap your ETH by swapping it for WETH on a DEX like Uniswap, which should be considered a wrap and only charge you the gas fee of the transaction. You can also, of course, swap any other token for WETH.
Supported Assets: Testnet
Supported assets and Earn test vaults
Testnet-mode Nyx uses Circle’s USDC as well as test assets we’ve deployed to Sepolia. These have no real-world value. We show a price for them only to simulate what Mainnet Nyx looks like with established, verified assets that have actual value. We have deployed a test Earn vault for each supported asset to simulate the private earning process on Mainnet. Vault APYs are artificially inflated to compress time during testing, and do not match Mainnet APYs.How to get Sepolia ETH for testing
We sponsor the transactions of your private account. However, using Nyx in Testnet Mode requires that you call our test asset faucets, as well as the official Sepolia USDC faucet from Circle, with your public account to obtain assets to transfer to your private account. In the assets table on your Nyx dashboard there is a faucet button for each. These actions require a small amount of (free) Sepolia ETH for their gas fees. Here are some good Sepolia ETH faucets:- Google Cloud Web3 faucet gives you 0.05 Sepolia ETH per day.
- A PoW faucet where your computer does some mining in exchange for Sepolia ETH (1-2 min+ depending on your computer and how much you want).
- Alchemy Sepolia faucet gives you 0.1 Sepolia ETH every 72 hours but requires that you have at least 0.001 ETH in your Mainnet address.
- Quicknode faucet gives you 0.4 Sepolia ETH every 12 hours but requires you to have at least 0.001 ETH in your Mainnet address.