Private eth_getBalance

Setting up the private client

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This downloads the PIR hint — the preprocessed public matrix that lets your browser decode an answer without telling anyone what it asked. It is the price of the privacy: the alternative is a server that simply reads your address. It is downloaded once per session and never sent back.

Look up a balance

What the server saw

The address you typed is not in that list, in any form — not hashed, not truncated, not encrypted-for-them. The server computed over every account it holds and returned a result only your browser can read.

This deployment

What this does not protect

The code you are running. This page and its WebAssembly came from the same server you are querying. PIR stops that server from learning your address if the client is honest — but whoever serves the page chooses what the client is. Over plain HTTP, so does anyone on the network path. For a stronger guarantee, run the client yourself: risepir-rpc client --pir-url … puts the same rewind client on your own machine, and the wasm here is built from that same Rust.
Who is asking. The cryptography hides which account, not who wants to know. The server sees your IP address, the time, and how often you ask. Use Tor (or any anonymising transport) if that matters to you; this client works fine over one.
Freshness. Answers are as of the latest finalized block, roughly 13 minutes behind what a block explorer shows. That is deliberate: finalized blocks do not reorganise, so an answer cannot be quietly invalidated. A balance that changed in the last few minutes will not appear yet.
Partial data set. This server only tracks accounts that have been touched since it started, so most addresses will return “not in the tracked set”. That is an error, never 0 — for an untracked account, absence tells you nothing about the balance, and answering zero would be a wrong answer.