Main map · Privacy and fungibility
Public by design, private by nothing.
Short answer first: Kaspa payments are public. Anyone can read who paid which address, how much, and when, and Kaspa adds no shield to the base protocol today. Addresses are names made of numbers, not masks: they hide your legal name until anything links it to you, once.
The problem
A public record is how strangers can trust the same history, and it is also a record anyone can study. Payments that share an address, or that pass coins from one known place to another, can be linked into a picture of a person's money: what came in, what went out, and when. That cuts twice. It exposes the payer, and it can split coins into clean ones and tainted ones, coins a shop or an exchange refuses because of where they have been. Money where every coin is not treated the same is money losing the property called fungibility.
What Kaspa does today
- Addresses are pseudonyms. The protocol records addresses, amounts, and times. It records no legal name, no account, and no identity document; the link from an address to a person exists only where the world outside the ledger makes it.
- Nothing is hidden behind a gatekeeper either. The same public record is open to the person being studied and to anyone checking a claim about them. There is no private tier of data sold to insiders.
- A fresh address costs nothing to use. Wallets can receive on a new address each time, which breaks the simplest link, the one address reused for everything. That is a habit the tools allow, not a promise the protocol makes.
Status: live · Checked Nov 5, 2026
What it does not do
- It does not hide amounts or addresses. The base protocol has no shielded pool, no encrypted amounts, and no built in mixing. A payment's size and its two ends are readable by anyone, forever, in the public web of blocks.
- It does not guarantee coins stay equal. Nothing in the protocol stops an exchange or a shop from treating a coin with a readable history as different from a coin without one. Whether that happens at scale is unmeasured, not settled in Kaspa's favor.
Status: live (no shield in the base protocol), unsettled (taint at scale) · Checked Nov 5, 2026
The one sentenceKaspa hides your name and nothing else; plan as if every payment you make can be read back to you later.
The exact version
What the public data actually exposes, field by field, and why the speed of the network sharpens it.
Every block in the web carries its payments in the open: the addresses paid from, the addresses paid to, the amounts, and the block's place in the order, which fixes the time closely. At many blocks a second the record is fine grained; a payment's neighbors in time are visible, and explorers render the whole web readable to anyone with a browser, no node required. Linkage grows from small facts: an address reused, a payment whose change returns to the sender, several payments made in one block by one wallet. Each link is public and permanent, so analysis only ever gets easier as tools improve.
Fungibility is the same exposure read from the coin's side. A coin's history is the chain of payments it has passed through, and that history is readable. If the places that take coins start scoring histories, two coins of the same face value stop being interchangeable, and the one with the marked history trades at a discount or not at all. The settling evidence named in the register is direct: clustering studies on real payment graphs, and whether exchanges act on them. Until those exist for Kaspa, this page states the exposure and leaves the outcome open.
Status: live (the exposure), unsettled (the outcome) · Checked Nov 5, 2026
Sources and the raw numbers
The exposure described here is checkable on any public explorer view of the network, and the known and unknown split matches the open questions register entry for privacy and fungibility, checked Nov 5, 2026. The tour's own payment walk, One payment, end to end, shows the same fields this page names. Where this page and the register ever disagree, the register is the record.
The unsettled part of this page is kept, with what evidence would settle it, in the open questions register, under Privacy and fungibility.