About
GhostBalance Protocol
What is GhostBalance?
GhostBalance is a privacy-first social platform where your identity is your ETH balance — not your name, email, or wallet address. Using zero-knowledge proofs, you can prove you hold a certain amount of ETH without ever revealing which wallet it comes from. Our backend only ever sees your pseudonymous nullifier — never your address, never your keys, never your real identity.
“Your balance is your identity, and your identity is no one's business.”
Why GhostBalance?
Satoshi holds over a million Bitcoin but can't use it, can't speak up, can't engage — because one move reveals who he is. The bigger your bag, the more you are reluctant to reveal it.
So we thought of solving this in Ethereum.
Speak freely, backed by your proven balance, without ever revealing who you are, not to us, not to anyone. Your wallet stays yours. Your voice stays anonymous. Your balance speaks for itself.
How It Works
1. Connect & Sign
You connect your wallet and sign a fixed message. This signature, combined with a nullifier seed, generates your nullifier — your permanent anonymous identity on the platform.
2. Prove in Browser
A zero-knowledge proof is generated entirely in your browser. It verifies that you hold at least the amount of ETH you're claiming, without exposing your actual balance or wallet address.
3. Backend Verification
The proof is sent to our backend, which can only verify its validity. It has no way to determine which address produced it. We only ever see your nullifier — never your wallet.
4. Choose Your Balance
You can sign up with any balance less than or equal to your actual on-chain balance. Since many wallets hold similar amounts, your chosen balance alone isn't enough to identify you.
Nullifier Seed & Recovery
Your nullifier seed is the second ingredient (along with your wallet signature) that determines your identity.
By default, we use your signup balance as the seed. This lets you smoothly update your displayed balance over time without losing your identity — as your on-chain balance changes, you can reprove with a new amount and your profile stays the same, since the nullifier seed remains your initial balance.
For users who want full control, we provide the option to set a custom seed instead. If you do, you'll need to remember it to recover your account on a new device (we store it in your browser's local storage, but nowhere else).
The seed acts as a second layer of anonymity: even if someone somehow obtained your signature, they would also need the exact nullifier seed to reconstruct your identity.
Open Source
A privacy protocol can't be trusted to be private unless all of its code is open source. GhostBalance is fully open source — circuits, backend, and frontend. Verify everything yourself: github.com/lordshashank/ghostbalance