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Introduction

What NULL is, and the one idea the whole protocol rests on.

You already know how crypto works. You have a wallet, the wallet holds tokens, and those tokens are yours. Everything else follows from that: seed phrases, hardware wallets, approvals you forgot about, and the sinking feeling when a protocol you used last year gets exploited.

NULL works differently. Nobody holds the tokens. They sit in a shared pool that isn't attributed to anyone, and you get the right to spend from that reserve instead of getting the tokens themselves.

The one idea. Spending is permission, not a transfer. Money goes straight from the reserve to whoever you're paying. It never lands in an account of yours on the way, because you don't have one.

THE USUAL WAY Source Your wallet a balance, with your name on it Payee drained · watched · frozen · traced WITH NULL Null Reserve value moves once, reserve to payee You authorize Payee

The middle box is the whole difference. In the usual model your wallet sits between the source and the payee, holding a balance. That box is where theft, surveillance, freezing and tracing all happen. NULL deletes it: you authorize the payment, and the reserve pays the payee directly.

Why bother removing ownership

Because almost everything that goes wrong in crypto goes wrong at the balance.

  • Your wallet gets drained. That's only possible because there was something in it.
  • Someone watches your address. That works because your balance and history are sitting there in public.
  • Your funds get frozen. That needs an account with your name on it to freeze.
  • Payments get linked together. They chain through the same address every time.

The industry's answer has been to get better at defending the balance: better key storage, better monitoring, insurance, mixers. NULL takes the balance away. You can't drain, watch, freeze or link something that was never there.

What it isn't

It isn't a mixer. A mixer takes coins you already own and tries to hide where they went. The ownership happened, the trail exists, and the mixer's job is covering it up. Here there's nothing to cover up, because nothing was ever yours to trace. The full comparison.

It isn't a custodian. An exchange holds your balance and decides what you can do with it. A reserve holds no balance for anyone, and the rules come from policy the protocol enforces rather than a company's terms of service.

Where to go next

See the whole flow Six stages, start to finish, in one page. Read this next. Then the concepts Reserves, spending rights, and why removing ownership gives you privacy for free. Then the detail Each stage on its own page, including what we haven't pinned down yet. Or just the questions Do I still need a wallet? Is this a mixer? What if the reserve runs dry?

Two things to know about these docs

Where something isn't decided yet, you'll see a dashed box saying so. We'd rather tell you what's missing than fill the gap with something that sounds right.

There's no glossary, deliberately. Every term is explained where it's first used and links to the page that covers it properly. If a word here ever leaves you guessing, that's a bug in the page you're on, not a missing reference section.