How Cipher works
Short on purpose. Everything here describes the product as deployed today, not a roadmap.
- Pick what you send and what you want back. Any coin to any coin, including the same coin (SOL to SOL, USDC to USDC).
- Give a receiving address and a refund address on the sending chain. Formats are checked before you continue.
- You get a one-time deposit address bound to your quote and your addresses.
- Send the amount from any wallet or exchange. Chains that need a memo (XRP, TON, Stellar) show it in amber.
- The order page follows the swap live until the coins land. The link works on any device.
- Swap
- Settled on NEAR Intents, the solver network Zodl (formerly Zashi) uses for its in-app swaps. Cipher is a registered distribution partner, so every swap is sent as a confidential swap: it settles on NEAR's private ledger and the deposit on the sending chain cannot be matched to the payout on the receiving chain from public data. Seconds to a few minutes after your deposit confirms; Bitcoin needs one confirmation, so expect around fifteen minutes from BTC.
- Dark Pool
- Your deposit lands in a confidential NEAR Intents balance owned by a key created in your browser. While it is there it is on no public chain. From the vault page you can hold it as long as you like, convert the whole balance to another coin inside the pool (about 15 seconds, nothing on a public chain), or withdraw any amount to any address as any coin. You can also let autopilot pay it out in up to four uneven parts at uneven times while the page is open. Cipher never holds the key or the funds.
- Send links
- From a funded vault, choose an amount and create a link. The amount moves into a brand new vault inside the pool (free, about 10 seconds), and that vault's key is written into the link after the #. Browsers never send that part to a server, so Cipher never sees it. Whoever opens the link accepts it into their browser and should tap Secure, which moves the balance into a vault only they hold; until then, the sender's copy of the link still works. Anyone who sees the link can take the money, so share it over an encrypted chat, not in public.
- Payment requests
- Pick the coin and amount you want and get a link. The payer opens it, pays with any coin from any chain, and exactly that amount lands in a vault in your browser. To tell you a payment is coming, the payer's browser encrypts its deposit address with a secret only the link carries and leaves it in a mailbox on our server, filed under a hash of that secret. We cannot read it or tell whose it is. Open the request page in the same browser to see payments arrive. The link can be paid more than once.
- Fresh wallets
- Next to any Solana or EVM receiving address, “new wallet” makes a brand new wallet in your browser. You save the private key (or an encrypted backup) before the address is used. Import the key into Phantom, Solflare, MetaMask or Rabby to spend. Wallets stay in this browser until you forget them on the Dark Pool page.
Cipher charges nothing during launch. Every quote includes the market spread, the rail's own small fee (about 0.2%) and network fees. The form shows the total cost of each swap in percent and dollars before you commit, and the amount you see is the amount you receive. Each Dark Pool payout or withdraw is its own small swap with its own network fee, which is why very small parts are not worth it.
- Cipher Score
- A 0 to 100 estimate of how hard a swap is to follow end to end, with the reasons behind it and one-tap fixes. It is a guide, not a guarantee.
- Make it uneven
- Round amounts stand out. One tap moves the amount 0.5% to 4% down to a natural-looking four-digit number.
- Scatter
- In the Dark Pool, choose up to 4 payouts. They leave the pool in uneven sizes at uneven times, to one or several addresses.
- Gas drop
- A fresh wallet that receives a token (USDC on Solana, for example) has no coin to pay gas with, and funding it from your main wallet links the two. Gas drop adds a separate small payout of the chain's own coin from the pool.
- Fresh-address check
- We look up the receiving address on its chain (Solana, Bitcoin, Litecoin, Tron and the main EVM chains) and warn if it already has history.
- Address fingerprint
- Every deposit address gets a pattern and a three-word name. If you move the address to another device or wallet, check it still matches. This catches address poisoning and clipboard malware.
- Encrypted key backup
- Vault keys export to a file encrypted with your password (PBKDF2, 310,000 rounds, AES-256-GCM). The file alone is useless to anyone who finds it, and it is the only way to recover a vault if your browser storage is cleared.
- Burn history
- Orders and vaults live only in your browser. One button wipes them. We keep no account and no order list for you.
ZEC is a first-class asset in both modes. Swapping into ZEC delivers to a transparent (t1) address, because the rail does not yet send to shielded addresses; one tap in Zodl moves it into the shielded pool, where balances and history are encrypted. To leave, swap ZEC back into anything.
No public, on-chain link between your deposit and your payout. Dark Pool balances, conversions and transfers inside the pool are not on any public explorer. The settlement network itself sees both sides, as any swap service does, and it screens for flagged addresses. For the strongest result, receive at an address you have never used, change the coin, and let the Dark Pool vary the size and timing. Cipher does not hold funds and is not a mixer.
- A late deposit, a short deposit or a price move beyond the slippage limit is refunded to your refund address, minus the network fee.
- A slightly larger deposit is filled at the live rate.
- A Dark Pool payout that fails returns to the vault balance. Retry it or withdraw.
- Sending the wrong coin or the wrong chain to a deposit address is usually unrecoverable. Double check.
Keep the order link. Status pages work from any browser.
Minimums are set per coin by the rail and shown on the quote. There is no maximum, but very large orders get worse rates; split them.