Core concepts
Notes & private balance
A private balance is not a single number stored under your address. It is a collection of notes, and that structure is what lets amounts be split, merged and decoupled from where they came from.
Think of notes like the cash in your wallet. Each note holds a hidden amount that only you can unlock and spend, and your balance is simply the sum of the notes you hold.
Like digital cash
Your private balance is a collection of notes, the same way the money in your wallet is a collection of bills and coins.
Only you can spend them
Every note is encrypted and tied to your keys. No one else can see the amount or use it, not even Veilo.
Created when you receive
Each time you receive a private payment, a new note is added to your wallet.
Used when you send
Sending privately spends one or more notes and creates new ones, including a change note back to you, just like paying with cash.
Why this matters for privacy
Because value moves as notes, it can be split and merged in arbitrary amounts inside the pool. That is the reason a withdrawal amount need not correspond to any deposit amount, which is precisely the correlation an observer would otherwise use to link the two ends of a transaction.
Notes are the unit the proof is about
Why Veilo merges your notes
Over time lots of small notes pile up, after receiving many small payments, for example. Having too many tiny notes makes private actions slower and a little more expensive, because your wallet has to work through each one and a single spend may need to gather several.
To keep things fast, Veilo can merge many small notes into fewer, larger ones. You may see an Auto-Merge Notes prompt when you open the app. Turning it on lets Veilo tidy up your notes quietly in the background. You can change this anytime in Settings.
Merging is a private operation
A merge happens inside the pool. It spends your own notes and reissues them to you. It does not touch a public address and does not reveal a balance.
Recovery
Notes are encrypted and indexed off-chain so your client can find them, but only your key decrypts them. Your deposit secrets are backed up in encrypted form so a private balance can be recovered on a new device, and, if the index is ever unavailable, notes can be recovered from on-chain data. See Apps & clients.
You don't need to manage notes yourself