Zecnero wallet 0.4.0.

No node needed. Your keys stay here.

The wallet has no light server: it downloads whole blocks and finds your coins itself, on your computer. It reaches the network through a node, and you choose which one under Node settings in the desktop wallet, or with --node on the command line:

What the public node (or any node you do not run) can see: your IP address; each transaction you send, and when; and your transparent addresses with their balances and history, because the wallet looks up their coins by address, so the node can tell they belong together. It also sees which blocks the wallet downloads, which shows roughly when the wallet was created. What it cannot see: your keys or recovery phrase, which shielded addresses and notes are yours, your shielded balance, or the amounts and memos of shielded transactions, which stay encrypted. The scan for your coins and all signing happen on this computer. The public node is run by the Zecnero project behind Cloudflare, so both can see the same. For full privacy, run your own node.

A new wallet shows a 24-word seed once and keeps its keys in a file encrypted with your passphrase. You can restore from the seed, and import a key printed by zecnero-keygen, so coins you have already mined come with you.

Mined coins must be shielded before they can be spent. The wallet applies the Mainnet rule on Testnet too: mature coinbase shows as "must be shielded", and a shield moves it to your Orchard address. From there you can send to unified addresses, with a memo of up to 512 bytes.

# create a Testnet wallet; it uses the public node
./zecnero-wallet-linux-x86_64 new

# bring in your mining key, from ~/zecnero/MINING-KEY.txt
./zecnero-wallet-linux-x86_64 import

# mined coins: shield them, then spend
./zecnero-wallet-linux-x86_64 balance
./zecnero-wallet-linux-x86_64 shield
./zecnero-wallet-linux-x86_64 send \
    nutest1… 1.5 --from-shielded --memo "hello"

On Windows the command-line wallet is .\zecnero-wallet.exe in PowerShell, with the same commands. The desktop wallet is a native Windows program: it needs no WSL and no node of its own. status shows the node, its peers and how far the wallet has scanned; sending waits until the wallet has scanned up to the node's tip.

# switch a wallet to zecnerod on this computer
./zecnero-wallet-linux-x86_64 --node own balance

# a node set up by the one-command miner installer
./zecnero-wallet-linux-x86_64 --cookie ~/zecnero/data/node/.cookie balance

Your own node needs RPC on 127.0.0.1:18732, which the mining guide sets up. --node own reads the cookie at ~/.cache/zebra/.cookie; --rpc-url and --cookie set another address or cookie and imply your own node. The choice is saved in the wallet file, and wallets made before 0.2.1 keep using your own node. In the desktop wallet choose My own node under Node settings; for a node inside WSL the cookie path looks like \\wsl.localhost\Ubuntu\home\<your Ubuntu username>\.cache\zebra\.cookie, where Ubuntu is the name wsl -l -v shows for your distribution.

Shielding and shielded sends need the Sapling parameters, about 51 MB. The desktop zip ships them beside the program. The command-line wallet downloads them from downloads.zecnero.org the first time, and checks each file against its pinned BLAKE2b-512 hash before using it.