Accounts & keys
Your Privacy Pools account is your wallet plus four protocol keys derived from it. There is no signup and nothing stored on a server: one EIP-712 signature deterministically produces a nullifying key for spending, a revocable key for authorization material, and a viewing key pair for receiving. Signing the same message with the same wallet always reproduces the same keys, which is why recovery needs no backup file.
What keystore registration means
Registering with the keystore contract takes two transactions: one inserts your account's authorization leaf into the keystore tree, and the other publishes your viewing public key. Registration is public by design. It lets senders deliver notes to you discoverably, with no out-of-band hand-off per payment, and it makes spending possible, because every transfer, withdrawal, or ragequit proves that the note's owner is in the keystore tree.
The deposit path is the one operation that never checks the keystore, so an unregistered wallet can deposit. The resulting note then waits: it can be neither spent nor ragequit until its owner registers, since those proofs require keystore membership. You can register at any time, but transfers, withdrawals, and ragequit all need valid keystore state, so frontends typically run registration as part of account setup.
Maintaining keys over time
The revocable key can be rotated in place at any time (after a compromise, for convenience, or periodically as a security practice), without touching your notes or your other keys. Losing local state is recoverable as well, because the same wallet signature re-derives the same keys, and discovery then rebuilds your note set from the chain.
In this group
- Derive your protocol keys: the four keys, the signature that produces them, and how to re-derive them on a new device.
- Register your viewing key: the two on-chain transactions and what they publish.
- Check viewing-key registration: look up whether an address is registered, yours or a recipient's.
- Rotate your revocable key: respond to a compromise without re-depositing.