Seance

Live: https://kylne700.github.io/seance/ (Tari Esmeralda testnet only)

Watch: a silent screen recording of about 60 seconds, filmed on the live page on 2026-10-25.

Seance reads real Tari Esmeralda transactions in your browser and shows, side by side, what a stranger with no key can read, what a recipient's view key adds, and what a token's audit key counts. It also lists what a sealed payment still shows to everyone with no key at all, such as the token, the times, the fee and the notes it spends. Open the page and a real private transfer is already on the table with the three ghosts at work; paste any transaction id to see another.

Dated note, 2026-10-24. The public Esmeralda indexer that this page and Tari's explorer read (esme-indexer-a.ootle.tari.com) no longer holds the 18 transactions linked in this file: it answers 404. The page copes. When the indexer is up but has dropped a demo transaction, that one card shows the copy saved in ledger.json (it says so, with the date the copy was saved, 2026-10-20) while the rest of the page stays live. The links in this file point to Tari's second public indexer, a stale mirror (its newest transaction is from 2026-10-21) that may drop history too. More, and how to check it: Where the demo transactions went.

Quickstart for a judge (2 minutes, nothing to install, no wallet):

1. Open https://kylne700.github.io/seance/. A saved real transaction (demo 1) is already on the table, labelled as a saved copy. The Stranger shows what anyone can read from it. The Medium, with Bob's view key, has read 0.00031415 SEANCE and the memo "Midnight at the old crypt. Come alone." The Auditor, with the demo token's audit key, has counted both sealed notes (0.00031415 and 0.00018585 SEANCE) and cannot open the memos. What still leaks, under the cards, lists what stays public.
2. Press Summon a recent transaction, or paste any Esmeralda transaction id and press Look at it. That asks the live indexer, and the Stranger shows the real public fields of that transaction. If the indexer's latest transactions hold no private transfer (the testnet is sometimes quiet), the page shows a recorded one from 2026-10-20 instead and says so. Give the Medium or the Auditor a key that fits (the demo keys are listed below) or a wrong one (Eve's) and watch it answer "The spirits are quiet."
3. Press Hold the seance on another prepared transaction, then scroll to The Poltergeist: a ghost with no key that tries four chain-analysis tricks on our 11 TARI demo payments and says which still work on Tari.
4. Check rather than trust. Beside each shown transaction are proof links: a live answer links to the explorer, a saved copy links to the raw answer from the second public indexer, to ledger.json and to its receipt on the first indexer. The Auditor card has a closed section with the 34-line Rust template that made the token, with a link to the token on the explorer, whose page lists the token's View key (the audit key's public half). npm test runs offline.

Limits, up front. Testnet only: nothing here touches mainnet. The page trusts the indexer's answer and does not check it against the chain. The Auditor reads only the notes of our own demo token. The demo transactions come from one throwaway wallet, so the Poltergeist's numbers describe that wallet. The cryptography is the official SDK, which we did not audit. More in the threat model.

Three ghosts read one transaction; a fourth studies the demo payments as a set:

• The Stranger holds no key. It shows what everyone can see: the id, the outcome, the fee, the sealed notes as real bytes, each with a plain caption. Under the cards, What still leaks lists what stays public, with this transaction's real values.
• The Medium holds a recipient's view key and listens inside the page. With the right key it hears the amount and the memo. With a wrong key it hears nothing: "The spirits are quiet."
• The Auditor holds the audit key of a token. It counts the amount of every sealed note of that token. It cannot read a memo, and a view key cannot spend. It works on the four payments in our own demo token (SEANCE), which was made with an audit key. On any other transaction it says there is nothing to count.
• The Poltergeist holds no key. It reads only public data and tries four chain-analysis tricks (address reuse, amount matching, timing, fee fingerprint), plus the spend graph as an extra, on the 11 TARI demo payments and on a synthetic transparent ledger of the same payments. Some tricks still work on Tari, and the page says which.

Made for the Tari October Build Contest, "Spooky Secrets". Testnet only. Nothing here touches mainnet.

Status: live at https://kylne700.github.io/seance/ (GitHub Pages, rebuilt from main on every push). The link-preview image is public/og.png. A result card was made for the contest post; it is not part of this repo. A silent screen recording of about 60 seconds, filmed on the live page on 2026-10-25, is public/media/seance-demo.mp4, served at https://kylne700.github.io/seance/media/seance-demo.mp4; it shows the page as it was that day. An older 56-second recording, made on 2026-10-18 and not part of this repo, shows the first set of transaction ids (see "Where the demo transactions went" below) and the page as it was that day.

This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗