Transparent and shielded
You will get from this page: an honest account of privacy here, and what the shielded pool does to an asset that enters it. This product treats the shielded pool as a first-class state, so it is worth two minutes to understand.
Plain language
Section titled “Plain language”Zcash has two kinds of value. Transparent value works like Bitcoin: addresses, amounts, and transactions are public. Shielded value is hidden by cryptography: the chain proves the money moved correctly without revealing addresses or amounts.
Zerdinals and ZRunes use only the transparent side. Content, addresses, balances, and activity are publicly visible, forever. Nothing in this product makes your on-chain activity private.
What shielding does to an asset
Section titled “What shielding does to an asset”Shielding does not make an asset private. It ends its trackability.
- If an inscription-bearing output is spent entirely into a shielded pool, the protocol can no longer follow it. The inscription enters the terminal state shielded, untrackable: it provably existed, its provenance up to that transaction remains verifiable, and no owner can ever be named again. The product displays this state plainly, with its own colour and its own broken-outline chip, and never guesses a shielded owner.
- If ZRune-bearing value goes shielded with no transparent successor, the balance is burned by protocol rule. It does not wait in the shielded pool; it is gone.
Unshielding later does not undo either outcome. Tracking that has ended stays ended.
Why the product treats this as a state, not a gap
Section titled “Why the product treats this as a state, not a gap”Most explorers show a shielded spend as a dead end or hide it. This product records it as what it is: a deterministic terminal state with a transaction behind it. An artifact page for an untrackable Zerdinal still shows the full provenance chain up to the shielding transaction, because those facts remain true and verifiable.
A concrete example
Section titled “A concrete example”An owner spends the output carrying inscription No. 087871 into a shielded pool. From that block on, the artifact’s page shows its complete history, then the shielding transaction, then the state shielded, untrackable. If someone later unshields the same amount of ZEC, nothing connects it to the inscription; the protocol never re-attaches tracking, and neither does the product.
Safety boundary
Section titled “Safety boundary”If you need financial privacy on Zcash, use shielded ZEC through a shielded wallet, and keep that activity separate from your artifact activity. Do not shield an asset-bearing output expecting to get the asset back.
Technical detail
Section titled “Technical detail”The exact conditions distinguishing a move, a burn, and a shielded terminal
state are normative:
Zerdinals v1 defines
SHIELDED_UNTRACKABLE and BURNED;
ZRunes v1 defines when a
balance burns. Both are deterministic: two independent indexers reach the
same answer for every transaction.