What is and is not hidden

zk-pad hides who controls the beneficiary's money and where it finally goes. It does not hide trading, and it cannot hide what a coin's creator chooses to advertise.

Summary table

Information	Public?	Notes
The coin, its pool, its fee F and its quote token	Public	TokenLaunched event
The creator's launch address	Public	The sender of the launch transaction
Every trade, trader address and amount	Public	Like any DEX trade
Holders and balances of the coin	Public	Standard ERC20
The dev buy	Public	DevBuy event
Fees generated, and the protocol / beneficiary amounts	Public	Auditable by design
The beneficiary id	Public	An opaque 32-byte hash
The beneficiary id's balances	Public	balanceOf(id, asset)
Who the beneficiary is (stealth key)	Hidden	Known only to the creator and whoever they gave the claim link to
Who the beneficiary is (social escrow)	Hidden from the chain	Every attestor of the committee can decrypt the hint on its own (threshold 1), so each of them knows
Who the beneficiary is (public social recipient)	Public	The platform account is named in a plaintext hint, with an attestor-signed label. Its per-account totals across coins are public.
The wallet of a public social recipient	Hidden	Bound to a fresh signing-only key; exits are shielded only (relayer and UI refuse direct claims)
What the coin's name, ticker, image and description say	Public	Often names the beneficiary. zk-pad cannot hide what the creator writes.
The beneficiary's wallet	Hidden	The stealth key is never funded and never sends a transaction
That a claim happened, its amount, asset, time, relayer and relayer fee	Public	Claimed event
A direct claim's destination address	Public	Use a fresh address
A Railgun claim's 0zk address	Hidden	Only the recipient's Railgun wallet can read the note
What happens to a shielded note afterwards	Hidden	Subject to Railgun's anonymity set on BSC
The stealth owner address	Public once registered	Revealed in the registration calldata. It is a throwaway key that never holds funds.
Social escrow bind: the new owner key and timelock	Public	BindProposed / BindFinalized events
The beneficiary's IP address	Visible to the relayer, attestor and RPC you contact	Unless you use Tor or a similar network. Services keep no per-user logs, but you are trusting that.
Which id you looked up	Hidden	The SDK downloads every id's balances and nonces (fetch-everything) and filters locally; the web app makes no id-specific RPC reads (consolidation prices come from one fixed batch of unit oracle quotes, the same for every visitor)
Your claim link or stealth key	Hidden from servers	Kept in the URL fragment, which browsers never send. Claim-kit files get random names, and search boxes refuse pasted keys and claim links instead of putting them in a URL.

Who can learn what

Party	Can learn
Anyone watching the chain	Everything marked Public above
The creator (stealth key)	The beneficiary's identity (they chose them) and, until the beneficiary rotates the key, the ability to claim
The creator (social escrow)	Which account the escrow is for (they chose it). Cannot claim.
A relayer	Your IP and timing (unless you use Tor), and the claim contents, which become public anyway
Each attestor	Which accounts have escrows (each one decrypts hints alone); which account logged in to bind
Railgun list providers (PPOI)	The shield transaction and the relayer address that sent it
The zk-pad protocol team	Nothing beyond the above, unless they also run a relayer or attestor

Common misunderstandings

• "Nobody knows who the coin is for." Only true if the creator did not say so. A coin called "Donate to @alice" is clearly about Alice. zk-pad hides her wallet and her spending, not the coin's message.
• "Railgun makes the payout invisible." The shield is visible: amount, time and beneficiary id. What is hidden is the destination 0zk address and later activity, and only as well as the BSC Railgun anonymity set allows.
• "The amounts are secret." No. Fee accruals and claims are public on purpose, so anyone can audit them.
• "Direct claims are private." Only if you claim to an address that has never been and will never be linked to you.