Our OHTTP relay

Why we run it

With Oblivious HTTP, a relay passes encrypted requests between an app and a server. The relay sees the app's IP address but can't read the request; the server reads the request but never sees the IP address. That only protects you if the relay and the server are run by different people. Lantern Zero needs independent relays, and so do other privacy projects in the Zcash ecosystem. So we run one for their servers, and ask them to run relays for ours.

Which servers it serves

• Only servers that opt in. Before forwarding to a server, the relay asks whether it accepts relayed traffic for a protocol the relay serves. Self-hosted Lantern Zero servers do. Other projects' servers are added when they ask.
• Never ours. It refuses lanternzero.com and every name under it, including our hosted service. If your wallet uses our hosted service, its requests must go through a relay run by someone else, and this one won't carry them.

What it sees, and what it keeps

• It sees your IP address and which server your request is for. Requests and responses are encrypted to the server, so it can't read them. (Lantern Zero also pads them to a fixed size, so their length says nothing either.)
• It keeps nothing about clients. No access log, no per-request log lines, no IP addresses on disk. To limit abuse, it counts requests per IP address in memory, for about a minute. It also caches each server's public key and its opt-in answer, which say nothing about clients.
• It logs only lines that name no client: when it starts, errors, and hourly totals across all servers. The machine's own system logs are kept for 30 days: system updates, our staff's logins, and failed login attempts, which include the IP addresses of the automated scanners that probe every server on the internet. Relay clients never appear in them.
• Our hosting provider sees network traffic to the relay, as any provider does. Its retention of that data is set by its own privacy policy, not by us.

Check it

The relay runs the open-source relay kit unmodified, with a configuration that differs only in the servers it accepts and refuses, listed above. Its operator documentation describes what it forwards (only the content type), its time limits, and its rate limits.

You can read the code, but you can't inspect our server from outside: you're trusting us to run it as this page says. That's true of any relay, and it's why wallets should spread requests across relays run by different operators.

Last updated 4 November 2026.