Vanta is the chain I’d build if I were starting Bitcoin from scratch with everything we’ve learned about ZK in the last decade. It’s a Bitcoin Core fork pinned at v27.0, with a native witness-v2 opcode for ZK-shielded transfers, a Poseidon-hashed nullifier set for double-spend prevention, and a 30-block coinbase maturity that keeps mining UX reasonable on a 1-minute-block chain.

What’s in the box

• vanta-node — the daemon. C++ Bitcoin Core consensus + a Rust ZK verification path bolted in via FFI. The verification path uses RISC Zero for the inner STARK and a Groth16 wrapper for the outer succinct proof. (architecture doc)
• vanta-explorer — Astro + a Rust indexer. Renders ZK transfers as first-class citizens (nullifiers, commitments, proof byte length) instead of falling back to “unknown opcode”. v2 serves API + SPA on a single Fly machine for cost.
• vanta-desktop — Tauri 2.x with a bitcoind sidecar. Privacy-first dashboard, transaction-detail modals, proof-on-server UX for users who can’t generate proofs on a phone. macOS notarization handled via framework bundling.
• vanta-swap — atomic swaps between BTC and ZER (the chain’s native asset) using HTLCs and BIP-199. Going to verifiable shuffles for private price discovery when both legs are shielded.
• vanta-node-v2 — the Rust rewrite of the consensus core, currently in test-renames-and-types territory (latest build).

What makes it interesting

It’s the first L1 deployment of the Relayerless Full-Privacy Framework (F_RP). Specifically:

• Self-paying shielded transactions (SPST) — fees come out of the shielded balance via a ZK proof. No relayer required.
• Private programmable state transitions (PPST) — arbitrary arithmetic circuits run over committed state.
• Threshold-anonymous broadcast (TAB) — submitter anonymity via ring sigs or FROST.
• Universal Private Execution Environment (UPEE) — the deployable wrapper that composes the above.

The full series (11 posts, ~30k words of math) documents the cryptographic argument; the chain is the implementation.

Operational notes

• Latitude.sh runs the primary seed nodes on bare metal — 1× AMD Ryzen 9 / 32 GB ECC RAM / 1 TB NVMe. Fly.io holds the failover with fly-deploy.sh and a hardened vanta-seed fleet.
• iroh-gossip for encrypted-note gossip on the 1-minute-block chain. NAT traversal works out of the box, libp2p doesn’t.
• Mining is supported via Bitaxe boards on stratum — see Mining Vanta with a Bitaxe for the stratum-python pool config.
• Devnet has been live since Q1 2026 with a reproducible regtest lane so anyone can boot a local 3-node network in under a minute.

What’s left

• Re-enabling the verifiable-shuffle network for cascade-mixing private atomic swaps.
• The post-quantum migration path (lattice + STARK) is on the roadmap for ~2030 once NIST PQC standardisation is done.
• A native macOS App Store distribution of vanta-desktop. Notarization works; App Store sandbox + sidecars is a different beast.

Where to start

• Code: Dax911/vanta
• Architecture: vanta-architecture.md
• The framework: Relayerless privacy series, post 1
• The wallet: Vanta Desktop walkthrough