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Risk disclosure

Draft: needs legal review

This page is a draft written by the engineering team. It has not been reviewed by counsel and is not legal advice. zk-pad is already deployed on BSC mainnet; this page will be replaced by reviewed text once legal review is complete.

By using zk-pad, its contracts, SDK, services or web app, you accept the following risks.

Software risk​

  • zk-pad is experimental software deployed on BSC mainnet without an external audit. Smart contracts may contain bugs that lead to a total loss of funds.
  • The protocol-admin contracts are owned by a single key (an EOA), not a multisig and not behind a timelock. If that key is lost, stolen or misused, configuration can change without notice. See trust assumptions.
  • The current contracts were deployed on 2026-10-05 and superseded a first mainnet deployment (2026-10-04) that lacked the round-4 review fixes. The 2026-10-04 factory is deprecated (it rejects new launches), no coin was launched from it and its FeeVault never held funds. The contracts cannot be upgraded or migrated: if a later deployment is ever needed, coins launched from an earlier one stay on that deployment's contracts for good (hook, locker and FeeVault) and do not get later fixes. Only use the contracts on the addresses page; see deployment.
  • Transactions on BSC are irreversible.
  • Liquidity is locked forever by design. If something goes wrong with a pool (a bug, a frozen quote token, a PancakeSwap pause), there is no migration path.

Market risk​

  • Meme and donation coins are highly speculative. Most lose all their value.
  • Prices can move extremely fast. Slippage, price impact, sandwich attacks and failed transactions can cost you money.
  • The anti-sniper fee can be up to 80% in the first two minutes after launch.
  • Fixed supply and locked liquidity do not mean a coin has value or that you can sell at the price you paid.

Third-party risk​

  • PancakeSwap Infinity governance can pause pools and change its protocol fee.
  • Token issuers (USDT, USDC, USD1, FDUSD, XAUt...) can depeg, freeze, blacklist or upgrade their tokens.
  • Railgun governance can pause, upgrade, change fees and blocklist tokens; PPOI list providers can refuse shields.
  • Chainlink or other price sources can be wrong or stale. The feeds and routes that bound creator-triggered consolidations are chosen by the protocol owner; a malicious owner working with a coin's creator could make that coin's credited fees swap at a bad price.
  • Relayers, attestors and the indexer may be unavailable, or may log data despite their policies.

See external dependencies.

Privacy risk​

  • Privacy is not absolute. On-chain analysis, small anonymity sets, timing and amount correlation, coin metadata, network-level observation and operational mistakes can reveal a beneficiary.
  • Every attestor of a social escrow's committee can, on its own, learn which account the escrow is for (hints are not threshold-encrypted), and so can anyone who steals one attestor's hint key.
  • Social-account escrows cannot be bound or claimed yet: no attestors are registered. If an escrow with a fallback recipient is not bound before its fallback delay ends, anyone can sweep its balance to the fallback recipient and the account owner can no longer claim it.
  • Read what is and is not hidden before relying on zk-pad for privacy.

Key management risk​

  • Whoever has a claim link or stealth key can take the funds. Lost keys cannot be recovered.
  • The creator of a private claim kit can claim until the beneficiary rotates the key.
  • Launching a coin that uses a real person's or organisation's name, image or brand may infringe their rights or mislead buyers. A coin named after someone is not endorsed by them.
  • Using privacy tools, launching tokens and soliciting donations are regulated, restricted or prohibited in some jurisdictions. You are responsible for complying with the laws that apply to you, including sanctions and tax rules.
  • Donations made by buying a coin are not charitable donations for tax purposes unless a competent authority says otherwise.