Send and receive

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Send to Ethereum

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What is the level of privacy?

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Summary

When you send to an Ethereum address, the asset type, amount, and the recipient’s Ethereum address is public. However, there is no link to your private account. In short, no one will know anything about your private account balance or activity (including us).

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How to best maintain your privacy

When you send assets out of your private account, consider sending them to one or more different Ethereum addresses you control (a fresh wallet, your exchange account, etc). This way the assets are not tied to the history of your connected wallet, or any connection someone has made between your connected wallet and your identity. Also, if you fund your private account with, for example, 0.123456789 WETH and then immediately send the exact same 0.123456789 WETH to another Ethereum address from your private account, external parties may suspect a connection between the two Ethereum accounts due to the asset type and amount matching and the timing lining up closely. So, consider breaking up your sends into smaller amounts spaced out in time.

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Transaction examples

Step 1. Aztec transaction to move assets to Ethereum There is an initial Aztec transaction involving the transfer of private state which has no publicly-visible sender information. The asset type and amount are visible onchain because the Nyx smart contract for the asset type is involved, and the recipient address is visible because this data point needs to be sent to Ethereum for the transfer to occur. The Nyx Token Bridge contract for the asset is visible in the “Public Calls” section of the explorer page for the transaction as well, which is the Nyx smart contract that facilitates the sending of the asset to Ethereum. So, what can be seen is that an unknown Nyx user initiated a send to the given Ethereum address for that token type and amount. Step 2. Ethereum transaction to send assets to recipient Next, on Ethereum, the recipient will receive the assets publicly with a transaction that shows a Nyx relayer as the sender. If someone matched the two transactions based on asset type, amount, and timing, they would not know which private account was involved, let alone which Ethereum account funded that private account to begin with.

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Diagram

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Private send on Aztec

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What is the level of privacy?

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Summary

Neither asset type, amount, sender, nor receiver are publicly visible in the onchain send transaction. Only the sender and recipient know these transaction details. However, the first time you receive assets from another Nyx user, there is an onchain record that an unknown address set up the capability to send you assets. The specifics remain unknown: how many times they’ve sent you assets and what the asset types and amounts were. So, if someone knows your address, they can know the count of the number of unique addresses that have initiated a transfer of assets to you at least once using the non-interactive handshake strategy. Again, they cannot see which addresses did this. (Learn more).

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Transaction example

There is no sender, recipient, asset type, or asset amount information shown publicly as you can see with this example transaction: