What is Nozy?
NozyWallet is a privacy-first Zcash wallet for the Orchard and Ironwood (NU6.3) shielded pools. It focuses on making every transaction private by default and removing the choice—or the mistake—of using transparent addresses.
In one sentence
NozyWallet is a Zcash wallet designed around your own Zebrad node, with shielded-only transactions (Orchard today, Ironwood after NU6.3) and no transparent support—Monero-level privacy on the ledger, with a stack you can verify instead of a vendor you must trust.
Why it exists
Most Zcash wallets support both transparent and shielded transactions. That flexibility means users can accidentally leak information on the chain. Nozy removes that risk: you cannot send or receive on transparent addresses.
But ledger privacy and infrastructure privacy are not the same thing. Orchard and Ironwood hide sender, receiver, and amount from the public blockchain. A third-party node operator can still learn when you sync, when you broadcast, and often which IP asked—unless you control the node yourself. Nozy is built for people who want both: cryptographic privacy on-chain and minimal trust off-chain.
Two layers of privacy
| Layer | What it protects | How Nozy helps |
|---|---|---|
| On-chain (Orchard / Ironwood) | Sender, receiver, amount on the public ledger | Shielded-only; zero-knowledge proofs; no transparent addresses; Ironwood migrate after NU6.3 |
| Infrastructure (your node) | Who you are when you sync, scan, and broadcast | Zebrad-first design; local witness derivation; you choose the RPC endpoint |
Orchard and Ironwood give you the first layer. Running your own Zebrad node is how you take the second layer seriously.
Why running your own node matters
When you use someone else’s RPC—an exchange, a hosted wallet backend, a random public endpoint—they do not need your seed to learn a lot about you. They typically see:
- Your IP address (or VPN exit) when you connect
- When you sync and when you broadcast transactions
- Chain queries tied to your session (block ranges, treestate fetches, mempool traffic)
That is not the same as reading your Orchard notes—they usually cannot decrypt shielded amounts from the chain alone. It is metadata that can correlate your activity, throttle you, log you, or feed analytics. In the worst case, a malicious RPC could try to serve a wrong chain tip or censor your broadcasts.
Your own Zebrad node changes the trust model:
- You verify the chain — You are not asking a company “what is the current history?” You run consensus software and validate blocks yourself.
- You shrink the observer — Sync and broadcast metadata stay between your wallet and your machine (or your VPS), not a stranger’s logs.
- You align with how Nozy spends — Orchard witnesses are derived locally from treestate your wallet obtains over RPC. With your node, that path does not depend on a hosted service’s honesty for spend readiness. See Zebra Node Setup and the Zebrad connectivity guide.
What your own node does not magically fix (so the statement stays true):
- Ledger privacy still comes from Orchard / Ironwood math, not from Zebrad alone.
- Network identity — Your node still talks to the P2P network; use Tor/VPN if you need IP-level hiding (Privacy Networks).
- lightwalletd — If you use a remote lightwalletd for compact sync, that service can see which block ranges you request. Prefer local lightwalletd paired with your Zebrad, or accept that trade-off.
- Recipients, exchanges, and OPSEC — KYC, address reuse, and device compromise are separate from node choice.
Nozy’s honest claim: self-hosted Zebrad is the recommended way to get full-stack privacy—not an optional power-user tweak.
The Cypherpunk idea
In 1993, Eric Hughes wrote the Cypherpunk Manifesto. It is not about aesthetics; it is about who must build privacy:
Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age.
Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world.
We cannot expect governments, corporations, or other large, faceless organizations to grant us privacy out of their beneficence.
Cypherpunks write code. We know that someone has to write software to defend privacy…
Nozy sits in that tradition:
- Code, not permission — Shielded-by-default wallet logic instead of “please don’t log my transparent send.”
- Selective revelation — You choose who sees your balance (you); the chain does not broadcast amounts or addresses in the clear.
- Skepticism of benevolent intermediaries — Keys stay on your device; the node you run (or explicitly trust) replaces an opaque hosted backend.
We are not relics of the 1990s—Orchard, Ironwood, and Zebrad are modern—but the threat model is the same: if you want privacy in an open society, you build systems that do not require trusting strangers with your financial metadata.
More in Manifesto and Philosophy.
What you get
- Shielded-only — Every send and receive uses Orchard / Ironwood; no transparent t-addresses.
- Zebrad-first — Built for JSON-RPC to your full node; local shielded witness derivation (not “trust the server’s witness”).
- Ironwood-ready — NU6.3 migrate / split / broadcast tooling so Orchard notes move into the Ironwood pool after activation. Newcomers: Why Ironwood?.
- Self-custodial — Mnemonic and keys stay on your device; no custodian can move your funds.
- Verifiable stack — Open source wallet + open source node; you can audit what runs, not just what marketing claims.
- Multi-surface — Desktop (Tauri), CLI, api-server companion, and mobile FFI—one Rust core, same privacy stance.
Optional compact sync via lightwalletd (Zeaking) exists for extension and fast catch-up; Zebrad remains the trust anchor for tip, broadcast, and treestate.
Next: Purpose — what Nozy is for.