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Documentation Index

Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.nyx.money/llms.txt

Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

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Summary

Below is a lightly-technical overview of how the main elements of Nyx work together to enable you to store, send, and earn money privately. For a more technical deep-dive, see our Technical Overview.

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Key elements of Nyx

  • Your Ethereum account: Authorizes private account actions through off-chain message signing.
  • Your private Nyx account on the Aztec blockchain: The Aztec blockchain was built to enable private account balances and actions. This is where your private account lives, with a balance and actions invisible to everyone else (including us).
  • The Nyx app frontend (in your browser): This is where you view your private account and initiate private actions. When you initiate a private transaction, the following happens: your Ethereum wallet signs an off-chain message approving the transaction and then a zero knowledge proof containing this and the transaction information is generated on your browser and submitted to the Aztec blockchain.
  • The Nyx app backend: Stores a limited amount of information - such as your contacts, account secret, and pending asset claim secrets - in an encrypted form we cannot read. This is so that you can easily move across devices and so that you do not have the burden of having to store things like your contacts.
  • Your passkey(s): This is used in your browser to encrypt information sent to our backend (and decrypt information loaded from our backend). This is how we ensure that only you can view and use your private account.
  • Smart contracts: Nyx smart contracts on the Ethereum and Aztec blockchains (along with Aztec, Aave, and other smart contracts). These facilitate Nyx actions.
  • Nyx relayers: The relayer’s purpose is to monitor the Aztec network for certain events (messages), and then call the corresponding Ethereum contracts to finalize those message operations on Ethereum. One main benefit from this pattern is that the relayer is shown as the sender and there is no link to your Ethereum account that initiated the action in Nyx. Examples include depositing into, and withdrawing from Aave, which are anonymous actions you can take using Nyx.
The first five elements are shown in the image below. For a look at how smart contracts and relayers fit in, see our diagrams of how Nyx features work. As as example, Earn (Aave lending)

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Login diagram