Privacy: Who See Your Money?

Part five of a five-part series on crypto privacy: privacy wallets, privacy tokens, why they matter for payments, and what Nervos Network could do in this space. Disclosure: I hold CKB, the native token of Nervos Network. This series presents information, not recommendations. Nothing in it is investment or legal advice. Previously: Part 4 showed that on Nervos, privacy is a script anyone can deploy, and that Nervos' RISC-V design now matches the zero-knowledge industry. The catch is the crowd: opt-in privacy on a small chain protects few people. Privacy fails at whichever layer is weakest. A perfect stealth address is useless if your wallet reports every address you own to a company's server. A perfectly private wallet is useless if you publish a name tied to an address you've used for years. Strong encryption on the chain doesn't help if every coffee you buy is a permanent on-chain record. So the right way to judge privacy on any blockchain is not one feature at a time. It's as a stack of layers, each of which has to hold. On Nervos, something unplanned has happened in 2026. Four separate teams, none coordinating with the others, have each built one layer of that stack: Layer What leaks without it Nervos project Status (September 2026) Network : who is asking about which addresses Your wallet's server learns every address you own, plus your IP address Pocket Node Live on mainnet, v1.8.0 Address : whether payments to you can be linked Every payment lands at one visible address Obscell Early release Amount : how much moved Balances and amounts visible to everyone Obscell Early release Identity : how people find you to pay you Either a roughly 100-character address or a name that exposes your history .cell names (Cellula ID) Live on mainnet since September 21, 2026 Payment flow : small, frequent payments Every purchase becomes a permanent record Fiber Live on mainnet since March 2025 Figure A — Four independent teams, five layers, and nothing connecting them yet.…