Cost of privacy

Every deposit, private transfer and withdrawal pays a network fee, and the fee is the same whatever the amount. At the reading of 29 Oct 2026, 05:12 UTC, a Railgun shield on Ethereum cost $0.10 in gas: 0.1% of a $100 deposit and 0.001% of a $10,000 one. These transactions use far more gas than a plain payment: a Railgun shield uses about 36 times the 21,000 gas of a plain ETH transfer (ethereum.org), and a private transfer about 52 times.

A pool hides a withdrawal among the deposits that could have funded it, the anonymity set that the Anonymity sets page counts. A fee that puts someone off depositing is one fewer deposit in that crowd, and a user who waits for lower fees or moves funds in fewer, larger steps leaves a pattern in the timing and amounts, as Where privacy still leaks explains.

Fees also explain relayers. A fresh wallet holds nothing to pay gas with, and funding it from a known wallet would link the two, so a relayer (Railgun calls them broadcasters) sends the withdrawal, pays the network fee and takes its own fee from the amount. Those charges, and the protocol fees some pools keep, are listed under Protocol and relayer fees.

The same action costs different amounts on different chains: the gas units are similar, but the price of gas and of the coin it is paid in are not. Monero charges by the weight of a transaction, at a priority the wallet picks; Zcash by its logical actions (ZIP 317); and Solana by signature, plus any priority fee the sender adds.

How each fee is worked out

EVM chains

Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum and BNB Chain: the gas units in config/cost.json times the gas price, then the coin's price. The gas price is the next block's base fee plus the median priority fee of the last 10 blocks (eth_feeHistory, with eth_gasPrice as the fallback), read once an hour through PublicNode, with dRPC (Ethereum) and the public endpoints of Arbitrum and BNB Chain as fallbacks. The same request reads Railgun's shield and unshield fees and the Privacy Pools Entrypoint's settings for ETH.

Solana

The median Privacy Cash deposit and withdrawal paid – lamports on 23 Oct 2026, the base fee plus a priority fee, read from the transactions; the fee is priced at the current SOL price every hour.

Monero

A transfer with one or two inputs and two outputs weighs about 1,538 bytes, measured on 23 Oct 2026. Each hour the fee is that weight times the normal fee per byte that a public node reports (get_fee_estimate), rounded up to the node's quantization mask.

Zcash

ZIP 317's conventional fee: 5,000 zatoshis per logical action, with a minimum of two. A shielding or unshielding payment counts three actions and a shielded transfer two.

Aztec

The median fee of the 20 newest transactions on Aztecscan, read each hour, in Fee Juice, which is AZTEC bridged from Ethereum.

Measured gas units

The transactions measured were found through Railgun's indexers, Tornado Cash's Deposit and Withdrawal events and the Privacy Pools Entrypoint's events, and their gas used was read from their receipts. Each row's source names how many and links one example.

Cadence and downloads

The hourly job reads the gas prices, fees and prices once an hour, from minute 12, and adds each reading to the day's figures. The last reading was on 29 Oct 2026, 05:12 UTC, and every source answered. The latest readings and the daily series are in cost.json, under the site's licence and credits.

The gas units, sizes and fixed fees were measured or checked on 23 Oct 2026.