Penumbra 🌘

Your privacy is only as strong as the crowd you're hiding in. Most privacy tools encrypt your data and transactions, but encryption alone doesn't create anonymity. That takes a crowd. This is the mechanic behind Zcash's Orchard pool. When you spend a shielded note, you prove it exists somewhere among millions of other notes without revealing which one. The larger that set, the more indistinguishable your transaction becomes. Millions of notes make probabilistic attacks meaningless. The anonymity set only grows because every shielded transaction adds to it permanently. The pool of notes you're hiding among never shrinks. As the pool grows, so does the anonymity set and the privacy it provides. Stronger privacy attracts more users, and more users bring more capital. This is already happening in Orchard where the pool has grown to millions of notes.