Ghost Vault

Make your coins private with the Ghost Vault

1. NIX Ghost Vault Overview

NIX Ghost Vault is the first privacy feature based on the Ghost Protocol that makes user’s coins completely private from the chain. The procedure for ghosting NIX is simple and can be performed at any time, so users can transfer NIX from the wallet to the vault and send them to a new location leaving no traces. This feature needs to be used with caution as it is experimental although being successfully heavily tested in testnet.

Ghost Vault privacy storage is only available for NIX, fundamentally representing a location where users can send their coins to in order to keep them stored privately on the chain and to enable sending them privately as well; the longer those coins are held in the vault, the more private they become. The vault was activated at block 53.000, along with NIX PoS upgrade.

The procedure of Ghosting NIX goes as it follows: NIX Coins go through the Ghost Protocol process, in which the original coins are minted into Zercoins. They are progressively allocated into an accumulator with every other user’s minted coins, so what is of public knowledge is the number of Sigma mints in the accumulator, and since this vault holds every user minted coins, none of them can be tied to a single wallet. Once the user decides to send coins from the Ghost Vault to another location, the Ghost Protocol is applied one last time, making sure no traces are left behind in order to guarantee a completely anonymous transaction.

The Ghost Vault is the first Ghost Protocol solution as it allows users to mint NIX, essentially making them disappear with no previous history and permitting users to decide when to spend their coins with no previous history.

Compared to other privacy options on the market, Ghost Nodes -being responsible for performing Ghost Protocol transactions- are not able to link the sending and receiving addresses together, which means they are incapable of knowing which coins are going where.

The coins that can be kept in the vault are the ones that are not being used for Ghost Nodes nor for staking; Ghost Nodes need to be public and verifiable on the network, for that reason those coins need to be in public transactions.

As the Ghost Vault uses the Ghost Protocol, it generates private fees to Ghost Nodes, so 0.25% of the coins stored into the vault is distributed among nodes as a form of income for backing the private transaction.